S. You doe amisse to make a law to take place in things past. It must stand for heereafter and I am verie well content it shall. Of your two jewels the one, but whether the better or no I know not, as it is you shall receyve heere again inclosed. I hope notwithstanding the man’s modestie in detracting from himself still in the Latin tonge, that yeat he hath more knowledg that waie than in the Greek, which by this epistle1 doth seeme no otherwise to flow from him nor to proceed lesse naturallie then what? you know the old comparison of hony out of a stockfish. And therefore there is no need he should κήδεσθαι καλλιεπείας εὐλέξιος ὡραιοκόμου. A phrase than which I dare saie Heliodorus2 hath not a sleeker and a tricshier3 one. But were it not trow you a great deal better to have fewer tongues and a litle more wisdome to guide them? For any thing I can discern by this small bit of write his judgment in things and wordes are much about one pitch. And therefore in my mind you have done very well in resolving not to troble yourself much with him4. Your lectures I should be marvelous glad to see published. But I fear least you be not able to perfect them still as you read. And if not then perhaps your revising them will be more then another reading, and by that meanes time will beguile both your purpose and other men’s hope. Well, as God will, whome I beseech to direct and strengthen you for the best. We are now in the countrie. Yeat if there be ought which you would have to be done in London, there cometh everie daie lightlie some or other from thence. Mr. Parrye’s suddain departure out of London caused your busines to be forgotten as I think. My self could not at that time goe to D. Turner, when I receyved your letter, and therefore I sent Benjamin unto him, and by his appointment thapothecarie hath delivered for you that which I hope is come ere this to your own handes. If he have not written unto you himself, then upon receipt of your next letter I will goe unto him or send, that he may be discharged, and you shall have word thereof. If my self had bene within when it was delivered, I had done it then. I left word it should be done. But they to whome I gave charge thereof were not in the waie or els their mindfulnes was not out of the waie5. My hartie commendations to Mr. Provost. Ours all unto your self. The Lord preserve blesse and keepe you. Enfield the vth of September
← To the Worshipfull My Verie Loving Frend Mr. · Contents · A List, in Order of Time, of Letters Preserv →
Footnotes
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[“Broughton composed an oration in Greek, which he sent to Whitgift concerning our Saviour’s descent into hell.” Strype, Whitg. II. 320. “In p. 390, he reproaches Whitgift for his Latin studies,” insinuating that he knew no Greek.] ↩
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[“Id confirmas Heliodori, gravis scilicet authoris, judicio.” Reynolds in a letter to Albericus Gentilis, subjoined to the “Overthrow of Stage Plays,” p. 166. Oxford, 1629.] ↩
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[“My tricksy spirit.”Tempest, V. 1.“I do knowA many fools … … that for a tricksy wordDefy the matter.”Merch. of Venice, III. 5.] ↩
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[Mr. Pusey, to whom the editor is indebted for notes 3 and 4, p. 111, writes on the subject of these letters, as follows: “I cannot find any tract of Broughton’s, which corresponds better to the references, than the Require of Consent: although I do not see in this the reference to the Sepher Juchasim, nor that to the Commentaries on Esther. Without however verifying the minuter points, one can see that R. H. knew his subject, and that, probably, much better than Broughton, who made so much display of it. From H.’s way of speaking, it seems to have been notorious at the time, that Broughton’s confounding the Jews at Frankfort was a pure fiction of his own vanity. He may have challenged some Jews there to dispute, but there seems to me internal evidence enough in this tract alone to shew that the dispute (if held at all) was not such as he has thought fit to publish. It appears a mere trick, to throw odium on his antagonists, by representing a Jew as objecting to Christianity just those points, which he (B.) was urging against them. For the most part too they are such points as no Jew would urge by way of objection: and he must have been a most complaisant antagonist, who selected for debate against Broughton, the very theses on which B. had been practising all his life, merely as it were to give him occasion of triumphantly producing his favourite explanations.“On the whole, he seems to have spoiled some learning by an inordinate quantity of vanity, which weakened his judgment and rendered him unfit for important works: and his exclusion from them, e. g. from the translation of the Bible, soured his temper. The importance which he attributes to some of the points in which he differs from the translators, appears almost like a partial insanity. At all times he betrays a weak judgment, and could not have been more happily characterized than in R. H.’s words: ‘pity he had not fewer tongues,’ &c.“With regard to the only point of importance in the question between Broughton and his opponents, the seventy weeks of Daniel, he seems to have been as widely wrong as Dr. Reynolds: for he bent the chronology to his own views, and having assumed that the limits of the seventy weeks were the time of the vision and the death of Christ, he shortened heathen chronology to make it agree with his view.“Lively, of whom Broughton speaks so lightly, but whom Pococke never mentions but with great respect, was probably, next to Pococke, the greatest of our Hebraists.”] ↩
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[Meaning, perhaps, (if the negative be not, as seems likely, from a slip of the pen,) that their “mindfulness” was “nothing extraordinary, nothing to wonder at.”] ↩