upon conditions, and upon one’s country upon the ‘salutary prejudice’ called one’s country (it is of good omen, with
remain or ‘lie’ at a foreign court, a resident ambassador, as distinct from the temporary ambassador who was sent on a special and limited mission, the latter only being at first and for a long time permitted. Wotton’s ‘pleasant definition’—a ‘merriment’ he termed it to James I in self-defence—was given in Latin, and in Latin that does not furnish the hinge of the conceit. Walton (‘The Life of Sir Henry Wotton ‘, in his Lives, ed. 1825, 122–4) gives the following account: ‘At his first going Ambassador into Italy, as he passed through Germany, he stayed some days at Augusta [Augsburg]; where, having been in his former travels well known by many of the best note for learning and ingeniousness,—those that are esteemed the virtuosi of that nation,—with whom he passing an evening in merriments, was requested by Christopher Flecamore to write some sentence in his Albo;—a book of white paper, which for that purpose many of the German gentry usually carry about them: and Sir Henry Wotton consenting to the motion, took an occasion, from some accidental discourse of the present company, to write a pleasant definition of an Ambassador in these very words:
“Legatus est vir bonus, peregrè missus ad mentiendum Reipublicae causâ”
which Sir Henry Wotton could have been content should have been thus Englished:
“An ambassador is an honest man, sent to lie abroad for the good of his country”.
But the word for lie—being the hinge upon which the conceit was to turn—was not so expressed in Latin, as would admit—in the hands of an enemy especially—so fair a construction as Sir Henry thought in English.’ Later in the ‘Life’ (ibid. 138–9), Walton writes that ‘a friend of Sir Henry Wotton’s being designed for the employment of an Ambassador, came to Eton’ (of which Wotton was Provost) ‘and requested from him some experimental rules for his prudent and safe carriage in his negociations; to whom he smilingly gave this for an infallible aphorism: That to be in safety himself, and serviceable to his country, he should always, and upon all occasions, speak the truth,—it seems a State paradox—for, says Sir Henry Wotton, you shall never be believed; and by this means your truth will secure yourself, if you shall ever be called to any account; and
