We catch many glimpses of these times in another branch of the same family.  When news-books, as the first newspapers were called, did not yet exist to appease the hungering curiosity of the country, a voluminous correspondence was carried on between residents in the metropolis and their country friends:  these letters chiefly remain in their MS. state.[A] Great men then employed a scribe who had a talent this way, and sometimes a confidential friend, to convey to them the secret history of the times; and, on the whole, they are composed by a better sort of writers; for, as they had no other design than to inform their friends of the true state of passing events, they were eager to correct, by subsequent accounts the lies of the day they sometimes sent down.  They have preserved some fugitive events useful in historical researches, but their pens are garrulous; and it requires some experience to discover the character of the writers, to be enabled to adopt their opinions and their statements.  Little things were, however, great matters to these diurnalists; much time was spent in learning of those at court, who had quarrelled, or were on the point; who were seen to have bit their lips, and looked downcast; who was budding, and whose full-blown flower was drooping:  then we have the sudden reconcilement and the anticipated fallings out, with a deal of the pourquoi of the pourquoi.[B]

[Footnote A:  Mr. Lodge’s “Illustrations of British History” is an eminent and elegant work of the minutiae historicae; as are the more recent volumes of Sir Henry Ellis’s valuable collections.]

[Footnote B:  Some specimens of this sort of correspondence of the idleness of the times may amuse.  The learned Mede, to his friend Sir Martin Stuteville, chronicles a fracas:—­“I am told of a great falling out between my Lord Treasurer and my Lord Digby, insomuch that they came to pedlar’s blood, and traitor’s blood.  It was about some money which my Lord Digby should have had, which my Lord Treasurer thought too much for the charge of his employment, and said himself could go in as good a fashion for half the sum.  But my Lord Digby replies that he could not peddle so well as his lordship.”

A lively genius sports with a fanciful pen in conveying the same kind of intelligence, and so nice in the shades of curiosity, that he can describe a quarrel before it takes place.

“You know the primum mobile of our court (Buckingham), by whose motion all the other spheres must move, or else stand still:  the bright sun of our firmament, at whose splendour or glooming all our marygolds of the court open or shut.  There are in higher spheres as great as he, but none so glorious.  But the king is in progress, and we are far from court.  Now to hear certainties.  It is told me that my Lord of Pembroke and my Lord of Rochester are so far out, as it is almost come to a quarrel; I know not how true this is, but Sir Thomas Overbury and my Lord of Pembroke have been long jarring, and therefore the other is likely.”