ves_ he would be totally forgotten. The estimate of their value will
differ very much, as the liking for not very original discussion of ethical
subjects and sound if not very subtle judgment on them overpowers or not in
the reader a distaste for style that has no particular distinction, and
ideas which, though often wholesome, are seldom other than obvious.
Wordsworth's well-known description of one of his own poems, as being "a
chain of extremely valuable thoughts," applies no doubt to the _Resolves_,
which, except in elegance, rather resemble the better-known of Cicero's
philosophical works. Moreover, though possessing no great elegance, they
are not inelegant; though it is difficult to forget how differently Bacon
and Browne treated not dissimilar subjects at much the same time. So
popular were they that besides the first edition (which is undated, but
must have appeared in or before 1628, the date of the second), eleven
others were called for up to 1709. But it was not for a hundred years that
they were again printed, and then the well-meaning but misguided zeal of
their resuscitator led him not merely to modernise their spelling, etc. (a
venial sin, if, which I am not inclined very positively to lay down, it is
a sin at all), but to "improve" their style, sense, and sentiment by
omission, alteration, and other tamperings with the text, so as to give the
reader not what Mr. Felltham wrote early in the seventeenth century, but
what Mr. Cummings thought he ought to have written early in the nineteenth.

This chapter might easily be enlarged, and indeed, as Dryden says, shame
must invade the breast of every writer of literary history on a small scale
who is fairly acquainted with his subject, when he thinks how many worthy
men--men much worthier than he can himself ever pretend to be--he has
perforce omitted. Any critic inclined to find fault may ask me where is the
ever-memorable John Hales? Where is Tom Coryat, that most egregious
Odcombian? and Barnabee of the unforgotten, though scandalous, Itinerary?
Where is Sir Thomas Urquhart, quaintest of cavaliers, and not least
admirable of translators, who not only rendered Rabelais in a style worthy
of him, who not only wrote in sober seriousness pamphlets with titles,
which Master Francis could hardly have bettered in jest, but who composed a
pedigree of the Urquhart family _nominatim_ up to Noah and Adam, and then
improvised chimney pieces in Cromarty Castle, commemorating