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He wrote a large number of books, including Dodona's Grove, a political allegory, Instructions for Foreign Travel , England's Tears for the Present Wars, A Trance, or News from Hell, and above all, Epistolæ Ho-Elianæ, Familiar Letters, chiefly written in the Fleet to imaginary correspondents, but no doubt based upon notes of his own travels.
I have a note of him as registering for his copyright, on March 16, 1639-40, Howell's "Dodona's Grove;" and thenceforward, in worse times, he stuck to Howell.
In that year, interspersed amid the still continuing tide of Pamphlets, Diurnals, Sermons, and other ephemerides, were such novel appearances in the London book-world as these two Treatises, one physical, the other metaphysical, by Sir Kenelm Digby, then abroad; an edition of Buxtorf's Hebrew Grammar; an Essay by Lord Herbert of Cherbury; some metrical religious remains of Francis Quarles, then just dead; some attempts to introduce the mystic Jacob Bohme, by specimens of his works; a translation of AEsop's Fables and those of Phaedrus; the issue of the second and third parts of the Epistolae Hoelianae or James Howell's Letters, with a re-issue of his "Dodona's Grove;" and a re-issue of Randolph's comedy of "The Jealous Lovers."
It carried about with it that melancholy presentiment of dissolution which has come to be so characteristic of modern life, but of which scarce a trace exists in ancient times, and this feeling would always have made it different from that cheerful carelessness which so attracts us in the Greeks; but even that downcast brooding heart was capable of conceiving great and heroic thoughts, which it might have clothed in noble shapes and forms, had not the axe of Providence cut down the stately sapling in the North before it grew to be a tree, while it spared the pines of Delphi and Dodona's sacred oaks, until they had attained a green old age.
He not only published Howell's "Instructions for Foreign Travel" in September 1641, and again the second and third parts of Howell's "Letters" in 1645, with a re-issue of "Dodona's Grove;" but he acquired, in the same year, the copyright of the first part of the "Letters," which had been originally brought out by another publisher. Ed.
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