Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/162

148 How for sound prudence She still bore the Bell; Whence may be drawn this high fetchd parallel: Venus and Venice are Great Queens in their degree, Venus is Queen of Love, Venice of Policie.

Mr. McClellan has been as little obliged to offer any old or new version of "the famous Hexastic which Sannazarius made upon the Citty of Venice, for which he receavd 100 Zecchins for every verse (amounting neer to 300l sterling) in lieu of reward by decree of the Senat," but this payment is so much beyond the highest modern magazine rates, that we cannot forbear reproducing the lines here, in Howell's English, omitting Sannazaro's Latin, as an example to publishers and an incentive to poets, if for no pertinence in the lines themselves,

A writer of such constantly besetting fancy as Howell would naturally call his work "A Venice Looking-Glasse," in that "short Analysis of the whole Peece," with which he prefaces the "Proeme" at last introducing the subject of his Survey; and an anxious author appealing to the English public as well as Parliament could not well forbear a wish to "prepossesse the reder … that he would not have adventured upon this remote Outlandish subject had he not bin himself upon the place; had he not had practicall conversation with the peeple of whom he writes.… And herin," he adds, "the Author desires to be distinguishd from those who venture to write of Forren affaires and Countreys by an implicit faith only, taking all things upon trust, having Themselfs never trodd any part of the Continent." It is by right, therefore, of an immediate and personal acquaintance with the matter that Howell is able to take the confident tone he takes at the beginning, when he does begin, and to assure his readers that "were it within the reach of humane brain to prescribe Rules for fixing a Society and Succession of peeple under the same Species of Government as long as the World lasts, the Republic of Venice were the surest pattern on Earth both for direction and imitation.… It seems some propitious Star was predominant at Her Nativity, and that Nature brought Her forth with Her limms well knit, and apt to grow up to a strong constitution, which is the cause that She is so long liv'd, and hath continued above a thousand hot summers … still fresh and flourishing, without the least furrow of age in her forehead, or any visible symptom of decay, whereunto Civill Bodies as well as Naturall, by those distempers and accidents which attend Time, use to be subject."

From this point so firmly established, in his own mind at least, our author goes on, not without a great deal more preamble, to the study, or as he calls it, the survey, of the Venetian constitution and government, "wherin ther may be divers things, usefull for this Meridian," that is to say England, where a theocratic oligarchy fast tending to a military despotism had supplanted the monarchy, and where Howell addresses the Parliament as "the supreme authority of the nation." He considers the Venetian state politically, geographically, internationally, commercially, and historically, especially in the light of "Her imitation of old Rome in most things," and devotes half his book to her annals under "Her 98 Dukes, Doges, or Souverain Princes." All along the line of his discourse and narrative blossom delightful conceits of fancy, and quaint flowers of rhetoric, but it may be frankly owned that with a prevailing fidelity to fact he does not scrutinize his material very closely, or forbear to report an event merely because it happens to be fabulous.

He was one of the most agreeable travellers and liberal observers who ever enlarged the bounds of English sympathy, and the "Familiar Letters" by which he is chiefly known, and which he is said to have written from Spain, France, Italy, and Holland, while resting quietly within the walls of the Fleet prison, where "the supreme authority of the nation" had lodged him, are graceful and charming pieces of prose in a time when most prose