workmen. It was not till 1622 that he returned, having visited Holland, France, Spain and Italy. With the intention of utilizing to better purpose his knowledge of continental languages and methods, he left the glass business and applied for a diplomatic post. Failing to obtain this, he was for a short time tutor in a nobleman’s family. At the close of 1622 he was sent on a special mission to Madrid to obtain redress for the seizure of an English vessel, but, owing to the presence at the Spanish court of Prince Charles and the duke of Buckingham to arrange a marriage between the prince and the infanta of Spain, the negotiations had to be broken off. He made many friends among the prince’s retinue, and, after his return in 1624, applied for employment to the duke of Buckingham, but without success. In 1626 he became secretary to Lord Scrope, Lord President of the North at York, and retained the office under Scrope’s successor, Thomas Wentworth. In 1627 he was elected M.P. for Richmond; in 1632 he was sent as secretary to the embassy of the earl of Leicester to Denmark; and in 1642 the king appointed him one of the clerks of the privy council. In 1643 he was committed to the Fleet prison by the parliament, according to his own account, on suspicion of royalist leanings, or, as Anthony à Wood says, for debt. Whatever the reason, he remained in prison until 1651. He had acquired considerable fame by his allegorical Δενδρολογία: Dodona’s Grove, or the Vocall Forest, published in 1640, and his Instructions for Forreine Travell (1642), which has been described as the first continental handbook; and now he was driven to maintain himself by his pen. He edited and supplemented (1650) Cotgrave’s French and English dictionary, compiled Lexicon Tetraglotton, or an English, French, Italian and Spanish Dictionary (London, 1660), translated various works from Italian and Spanish, wrote a life of Louis XIII. and issued a number of political pamphlets, varying the point of view somewhat to suit the changes of the time. Among these tracts may be mentioned a rather malicious Perfect Description of the People and Country of Scotland, which was revived by John Wilkes and printed in the North Briton during the agitation directed against Lord Bute. In 1660 he asked for the place of clerk of the privy council; and, though this was not granted him, the post of historiographer royal was created for him. In 1661 he applied for the office of tutor in foreign languages to the infanta Catherine of Braganza, and in 1662 published an English Grammar translated into Spanish. He was buried in the Temple Church on the 3rd of November 1666, having realized to the last his favourite motto, “Senesco non segnesco.”
All Howell’s writings are imbued with a certain simplicity and quaintness. His elaborate allegories are forgotten; his linguistic labours, of value in their time, are now superseded; but his Letters, the Epistolae Ho-elianae (four volumes issued in 1645, 1647, 1650 and 1655), are still models of their kind. Their dates are often fictitious, and they are, in nearly every case, evidently written for publication. Thackeray said that the Letters was one of his bedside books. He classes it with Montaigne and says he scarcely ever tired of “the artless prattle” of the “priggish little clerk of King Charles’s council.”
The Epistolae have been frequently edited, notably by J. Jacobs in 1890, with a commentary (1891), and Agnes Repplier (1907).
HOWELLS, WILLIAM DEAN (1837–), American novelist, was born at Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, on the 1st of March 1837. His father, William Cooper Howells, a printer-journalist, moved in 1840 to Hamilton, Ohio, and here the boy’s early life was spent successively as type-setter, reporter and editor in the offices of various newspapers. In the midst of routine work he contrived to familiarize himself with a wide range of authors in several modern tongues, and to drill himself thoroughly in the use of good English. In 1860, as assistant editor of the leading Republican newspaper in Ohio, he wrote—in connexion with the Presidential contest—the campaign life of Lincoln; and in the same year he was appointed consul at Venice, where he remained till 1865. On his return to America he joined the staff of the Atlantic Monthly, and from 1872 to 1881 he was its editor-in-chief. Since 1885 he has lived in New York. For a time he conducted for Harper’s Magazine the department called “The Editor’s Study,” and in December 1900 he revived for the same periodical the department of “The Easy Chair,” which had lapsed with the death of George William Curtis. Of Mr Howells’s many novels, the following may be mentioned as specially noteworthy: Their Wedding Journey (1872); The Lady of the Aroostook (1879); A Modern Instance (1882); The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885); The Minister’s Charge (1886); A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889); The Quality of Mercy (1892); The Landlord at Lion’s Head (1897). He also published Poems (1873 and 1886); Stops of Various Quills (1895), a book of verse; books of travel; several amusing farces; and volumes of essays and literary criticism, among others, Literary Friends and Acquaintance (1901), which contains much autobiographical matter, Literature and Life (1902), and English Films (1905).
Howells is by general consent the foremost representative of the realistic school of indigenous American fiction. From the outset his aim was to portray life with entire fidelity in all its commonplaceness, and yet to charm the reader into a liking for this commonplaceness and into reverence for what it conceals. Though in his earliest novels his method was not consistently realistic—he is at times almost as personal and as whimsical as Thackeray—yet his vivid impressionism and his choice of subjects, as well as an occasional explicit protest that “dulness is dear to him,” already revealed unmistakably his realistic bias. In A Modern Instance (1882) he gained complete command of his method, and began a series of studies of American life that are remarkable for their loyalty to fact, their truth of tone, and their power to reveal, despite their strictly objective method, both the inner springs of American character and the sociological forces that are shaping American civilization. He refuses to over-sophisticate or to over-intellectualize his characters, and he is very sparing in his use of psychological analysis. He insists on seeing and portraying American life as it exists in and for itself, under its own skies and with its own atmosphere; he does not scrutinize it with foreign comparisons in mind, and thus try to find and to throw into relief unsuspected configurations of surface. He keeps his dialogue toned down to almost the pitch of everyday conversation, although he has shown in his comedy sketches how easy a master he is of adroit and witty talk.
See also J. M. Robertson, Essays towards a Critical Method (London, 1889); H. C. Vedder, American Writers (Boston, 1894).
HOWITT, WILLIAM (1792–1879), English author, was born on the 18th of December 1792 at Heanor, Derbyshire. His parents were Quakers, and he was educated at the Friends' public school at Ackworth, Yorkshire. In 1814 he published a poem on the “Influence of Nature and Poetry on National Spirit.” He married, in 1821, Mary Botham (1799–1888), like himself a Quaker and a poet. William and Mary Howitt collaborated throughout a long literary career, the first of their joint productions being The Forest Minstrels and other Poems (1821). In 1831 William Howitt produced a work for which his habits of observation and his genuine love of nature peculiarly fitted him. It was a history of the changes in the face of the outside world in the different months of the year, and was entitled The Book of the Seasons, or the Calendar of Nature (1831). His Popular History of Priestcraft (1833) won for him the favour of active Liberals and the office of alderman in Nottingham, where the Howitts had made their home. They removed in 1837 to Esher, and in 1840 they went to Heidelberg, primarily for the education of their children, remaining in Germany for two years. In 1841 William Howitt produced, under the pseudonym of “Dr Cornelius,” The Student Life of Germany, the first of a series of works on German social life and institutions. Mary Howitt devoted herself to Scandinavian literature, and between 1842 and 1863 she translated the novels of Frederika Bremer and many of the stories of Hans Andersen. With her husband she wrote in 1852 The Literature and Romance of Northern Europe. In June of that year William Howitt, with two of his sons, set sail for Australia, where he spent two years in the goldfields. The results of his travels appeared in A Boy’s
