The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume VII. Cavalier and Puritan.
§ 12. Howell’s other writings
James Howell’s literary activity was very far from being exhausted by his letters; during the years from 1642 to 1651, his pen was never at rest, and the habit, once acquired, was never relinquished. But, in one way or another, most of his lesser productions seem more or less supplementary to the work on which his literary reputation rests. An apparent exception is Dendrologia, Dodona’s Grove, or the Vocall Forest (1640), the earliest of his publications, which may be described as an allegorical gallery of characters conveying, under the thin veil of the names of trees or of designations derived from them, the political sympathies or antipathies of the writer. An allegory of this sort admitted of easy multiplication, and Howell appended to it a series of skeleton pleas, similar in design, for the monarchical form of government. A second appendix, England’s Teares for the present Warres, is a rhetorical lament by London’s mother, England.
In a different vein—one of rough satirical humour—are two curious pieces of Howell’s later years, which, as it were, travesty the sober summaries exemplified in his letters—A Brief Character of the Low Countries under the States (1660) and A Perfect Description of the Country of Scotland (1659). The satire against the Dutch is at least accompanied by a recognition of some of their merits; but the anti-Scottish tract descends into invective so bitter and so coarse that its date alone can excuse it; the unerring instinct of Wilkes, more than a century later, selected it for reproduction, with a sly preamble, in No. 31 of The North Briton (August, 1762).
In his capacity as a traveller, Howell, though familiar only with western, and parts of southern and central, Europe, promulgated Instructions for Forreine Travell (1642, republished 1650, with a new appendix “for Travelling into Turkey and the Levant parts,” which, unlike Fynes Moryson and Coryate, he had himself never visited). The little book is a very diverting, but, at the same time, very rational anticipation of the introductions to guidebooks of later days, containing, as it does, much valuable historical, political and (allowing for the philological shortcomings of the age) linguistic observation interspersed with interesting observations on men and manners.
It could, however, hardly be that he should not be most at home in London, where, by his own choice, or lodged by the parliament, he spent a large portion of his life; and his Londinopolis; An Historical Discourse or Perlustration of the City of London (1657), a careful guidebook of London, with a survey of its several wards, and special mention of its lawcourts, is among the last literary fruits of his life, bearing the characteristic motto Senesco, non segnesco. It makes no pretence of being wholly original; and, indeed, the author confesses that, in this instance, he has followed the examples of “the Lord Bacon’s Henry the Seventh, and my Lord Herbert’s Henry the eighth,” of which the noble authors,