rn we shall have one door
open to innocence. Yet, Madam, you are not such an Ireland, as produceth
neither ill, nor good; no Spiders or Nightingales, which is a rare
degree of perfection: But you have found and practised that experiment,
That even nature, out of her detesting of emptiness, if we will make
that our work to remove bad, will fill us with good things. To abstain
from it, was therefore but the Childhood and Minority of your Soul,
which hath been long exercised since, in your manlier active part, of
doing good. Of which since I have been a witness and subject, not to
tell you some times, that by your influence and example I have attained
to such a step of goodness, as to be thankful, were both to accuse your
power and judgment of impotency and infirmity.

_Your Ladyship's in all Services_,

JOHN DONNE.[95]

August 2d, 1607.

FOOTNOTES:

[94] Mr. Gosse (who has inserted them in his _Life and Letters of
Donne_) is perhaps right in putting letter 7 last. I give no opinion on
this but merely keep the order in which they originally appeared in the
text and in an appendix to the _Life of Herbert_ (1670 edit.). I am not
certain to which "first" the "second" in letter 9 refers. "Bevis of
Hampton" generally for "knight errant"; "Legier," a _resident_
Ambassador; "States" in the plural--always then "the Dutch";
_Snake_lessness is more often assigned to Ireland than spiderlessness.

[95] The first of these letters, with the sonnet, appears, I think, in
all editions of Walton, who has apparently entered the date wrongly. The
other three were copied for me from the 1670 original by Miss Elsie
Hitchcock, I have slightly modernised a few spellings in them.

JAMES HOWELL (1593-1666)

"The Father" of something is an expression in the history of
literature which has become, more justly than some other
traditional expressions, rather odious to the modern mind.
For in the first place it is an irritatingly conventional
phrase, and in the second the paternity is usually
questionable. But "the priggish little clerk of the
Council," as Thackeray (who nevertheless loved his letters)
calls Howell, does really seem to deserve the fathership of
all such as in English write unofficial letters "for
publication."[96] He wrote a great deal else: and would no
doubt in more recent times have been a "polygraphic"
journalist of some distinction. And he had plenty to