It is true that, in portraying the
middle-class types who opposed their ideals, the display of wit
was somewhat hampered by the bitterness of the satire.
middle-class types who opposed their ideals, the display of wit
was somewhat hampered by the bitterness of the satire.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v04
You knock
at the gates but, like Maevius's Italianate poetry, all is showy with-
out but empty within. No smoke comes from the chimneys, the
sign of old-fashioned hospitality. The truth is that hunger and
death are now abroad, and the rich, who should make head against
them, have fled, leaving the poor to bear the brunt.
Although Hall's moral earnestness found few imitators in verse
satire, others were not slow to recognise the possibilities of Juve-
nalian invective as a literary exercise. Edward Guilpin produced
a volume entitled Skialetheia or A Shadowe of Truth (1598), pos-
sibly influenced by Du Bartas's Semaines“, in which he vigorously
protested against the emasculated poetry of his age, and claimed
that satires and epigrams were the only antidote. John Marston,
in the same year, coupled a very erotic poem, The Meta-
morphosis of Pygmalion's Image, with Certaine Satyres, which
were probably composed in haste to keep up with the new
1 Bk. iv, Sat. 11.
2 Ibid. Sat. iv.
* See bibl.
• Translated that year into English by Joshua Sylvester.
## p. 332 (#354) ############################################
332 London and Popular Literature
1
6
trend of literary taste. The work of both writers bears the mark
of academic fabrication. Yet both are unmistakably influenced
by the London around them. These satires are not moral de-
nunciations, but studies in hypocrisy, affectation and compromise
-vices peculiar to urban society—which they illustrate with life-
like silhouettes culled from the court, the ordinary, the street and
the aisle of St Paul's. Marston adds zest to these character
sketches by a literary controversy with Hall, who had satirised him
as Labeo? ; and, next year, abandoning love poetry once for all, he
produced another volume of satires, The Scourge of Villanie
(1599), in which the hypocrisy of the sensualist is exhibited in
its most offensive forms. The tract is memorable for an essay in
criticism' and a 'Dunciad’ combined, in the sixth satire. After in-
geniously accounting for The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion as an
object-lesson against erotic verse, Marston turns on his literary con-
frères, ridiculing the invocations of some, the dreams and visions
of others and the bathos to which the over-inspired descend. The
critics are even more contemptible. When Capro approves, we
know that he has found a line which 'incends his lustful blood';
Muto, the fop, admires what he cannot understand ; Friscus, in
criticising a book, always pretends to recognise passages from
Horace and Juvenal, though he has never read a line of either.
In these and similar productions, scurrility was rapidly becoming
an end and object in itself. The spirit of the Tudor 'flytings,'
which had reappeared in the Marprelate controversy and the
Harvey-Nashe feud, was now taking yet another lease of life
under the stimulating influence of Roman satire. But the licensers
became alarmed at this recrudescence of envy and hatred, and,
before the end of 1599, an order was issued to suppress the
offensive works of Nashe, Harvey, Hall, Guilpin, Marston and
others? However, the edict by no means brought peace and
goodwill into literature. A 'flyting' arose over The Scourge of
Villanie within two years of its suppression, and gladiatorial
combats continued, in the world of letters, to be the recognised
resource of the intellectually unemployed.
But, quite apart from personal animosity, formal satire was
bound to thrive among the upper classes. As we have seen, this
form of classical imitation originated in a reaction from love
poetry, but its subsequent developments were due to a deeper
movement. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, a sense
1 Bk. Ili, Sat. x.
? See bibl. for particulars of the edict.
3 See bibl. under Flytings.
## p. 333 (#355) ############################################
( Humours'
333
of disillusionment was pervading the nation, caused, partly, by the
corruption of the governing classes, and, even more, by the bitter
social and religious antagonisms among the people themselves.
They began to lose faith in high ideals and heroic sentiments, and,
as the passions and deeds of men lost their hold on the imagina-
tion, the petty curiosities and materialised interests, inseparable
from city life, came out of the shadow. Attention was drawn
more and more to the commonplace side of human nature. This
tendency is already noticeable in Nashe, and, by the death of
Elizabeth, the moods and idiosyncrasies of people were becoming
the commonest themes of creative literature. As the physicians
had explained temperament to be dependent on the predominance
of one of the four humours or moistures-phlegm, blood, choler
and melancholy-which pervaded the physiology of man, it became
fashionable to dignify any mental characteristic or even pose with
the name of humour,' and to deem the most miserable affectations
worthy of literary comment!
The debasement of thought was accompanied by a growing
preoccupation in form and style. Seneca's maxim in hoc omnis
hyperbole extenditur ut ad verum mendacio perveniat began to be
universally abused. It will be pointed out elsewhere how this
decadence affected the theatre and caused the unsympathetic and
exaggerated portrayal of types to take the place of the humour
and pathos of incident. But it concerns us to notice here that
this artificiality of sentiment and expression, which caused the
decay of comedy, stimulated an enormous output of tractarian
literature. A vast number of miscellaneous pamphlets began to
appear. They treated the 'humours' of men hardly less effectively
than the theatre, and they offered endless opportunity for experi-
ments in style and classical imitation which the theatre did not
offer.
Juvenalian satire fell under this influence and became a fashion.
A large number of writers wrote in this style with elaborate and
suggestive titles? . Even R. C. , author of The Times Whistle, chose
the decasyllabic couplet as the vehicle for his homilies on such
subjects as atheism, pride, avarice, gluttony and lasciviousness.
His moralisations, like some of George Wither's, are unsuited to
1 Vide Shadwell, The Humourists, Epilogue; Ben Jonson, Every Man out of his
Humour, The Induction and The Magnetic Lady, introduction; John Marston, Scourge
of Villanie, Sat. &; S. Rowlands, The Letting of Humors Blood, Epig. 27; Nym bope-
lessly misuses the word : vide H. B. Wheatley, intro. to Merry Wives, 1886. Also
N. & Q. Ser. x, vol. xi, Feb. 20, 1909.
2 See bibl. under Satire.
## p. 334 (#356) ############################################
334
London and Popular Literature
dramatic form, but so vitalising was the study of London 'humours,'
that, while his denunciations of the more heinous vices are dull to
the extreme, his character sketches of men's weaknesses and
affectations are bright and vivid'.
At the end of the sixteenth century, it was discovered that the
abnormalities and eccentricities of conduct about which men
laughed and talked, rather than waxed indignant, could be best
portrayed by some detached, fragmentary form of composition,
and imitation of the Latin epigram became the rage. This interest
in human peculiarities and oddities dates from the production of
Mery Tales and Quicke Answers, and the new departure in
classicism impoverished the development of the jest-books as well
as of the drama. Even at that period, John Heywood had
embodied this type of anecdote in fragments of rough verse which
his publishers chose to call epigrams? , and Robert Crowley had
issued sallies of moral and social satire under the same name?
But the progress of civilisation and the growth of London had
made character far more complex, and the taste for literary form,
coupled with increasing social intercourse, had prepared men of
culture for the pointed Latin epigram which had already been
refined into a subtle but formidable weapon by the Italians from
the days of Pius II to Leo X (1458—1522). Sir John Harington
and Sir John Davies were among the first who adapted
this type to English uses, and they were followed by Thomas
Bastard (1597), John Weever (1598) and Samuel Rowlands (1600).
After the accession of James, Catullus and Martial were imitated
as frequently as Juvenal, and were preferred by those who realised
that 'humours' were a theme for the witticisms of conversation
rather than for the tirades of a moralist. John Davies of Hereford
was, perhaps, the most typical. In 1610 he brought out The
Scourge of Folly, depicting such social offences as Fuscus's
boorishness", Gorgonius's slovenly appearance", Brunnus's unctuous
manners and Classus's loquacity? . But the epigram, then as
always an offspring of social intercourse, must culminate in a
conceit, and Davies frequently relinquishes the scourging of folly
merely to present a play of paradox or fancy. In parting
company with satire, the epigram came to rely more on the
1 Vide satires Against shamıs' and 'Against pride. '
• See bibl.
3 The One and Thirty Epigrams, 1560.
4 Epig. 8.
* Epig. 101.
6 Epig. 1 or 2.
7 Epig. 263.
8 Cf. Epig. 176, comparing a gamester to the ivy which first loosens the masonry,
grows over and then holds it together, as a gambler does his estate.
a
## p. 335 (#357) ############################################
Epigram and Character Sketch
335
artifices of literary form, and its votaries, however frivolous their
theme, helped to prepare the age of Addison and Pope by
recognising the importance of workmanship and cultivating the
niceties of expression!
Bastard's work and that of Davies mark the stage when litera-
ture was being cultivated as a social art. The epigram has all the
atmosphere of a coterie. It is conceived in a lighter vein, it is
suited to the eccentricities, not the degradation, of character;
it adorns everyday interests with the charm of literary form ;
it is a detached fragmentary production convenient for circula-
tion. But, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, it was
discovered that the Theophrastian character sketch fulfilled all
these conditions, offered greater scope to the play of conversa-
tional idiom, gave the sanction of classical form to the age's love
of portrait-writing and, in some measure, satisfied the interests
which it was the function of the stage to gratify.
In order to understand the influence of Theophrastus, it must
be remembered that his life falls into the period 373—284 B. C. ,
when the Athenian commonwealth was a community of burghers,
all educated in the same manner, dressed in the same style and
occupied in the same pursuits. Their lives were not, apparently,
much complicated by political strife, commercial expansion, or
religious controversy. Hence, the moral and ethical differences of
men were noticeable only in the common traffic of existence, and
study of character became a close attention to details of conduct.
Theophrastus, probably under the inspiration of Aristotle, dis-
cusses about thirty cases in which men vary from normal perfection.
This variation he does not find in their appearance, dress or thoughts,
but in one side of their habitual conduct. A sketch or description
from this point of view requires a special technique. Theophrastus
begins each essay by briefly defining the quality under discussion-
be it irony, avarice, boorishness, or stupidity-and then illustrates
the definition by a number of typical actions. As the actions have no
necessary connection with each other, but are drawn from any kind
of situation, in which the particular propensity will betray itself,
the portraits may fairly claim to be generic. As the instances and
anecdotes are within the range of everyone's daily experience,
the portraits have a touch of reality. Now, character sketches, as
1 Cf. Epig. 106, which is practically a paraphrase of one of Bastard's on the
slowness of his composition.
Vide • The Analyses of Character' in Ethics, Bk. iv and Rhetoric, Bk. II.
## p. 336 (#358) ############################################
336 London and Popular Literature
we have seen, were already a common feature of English social
literature. But they were accidental productions subordinated to
the main interests of a connected work, produced without method,
overladen with non-essentials, or disfigured by gross caricature.
Theophrastus introduced three changes. He raised the character
sketch to the dignity of an independent creation, containing its
own interest within itself; he emphasised action as the essence of
such description; he provided a stereotyped technique. This
genre, the product of a simpler civilisation, but a more mature
literary art, was quickly adopted by the writers of the age and
transformed into a vehicle for ideas far beyond the dreams of the
inventor.
The first printed adaptation came from the pen of Joseph Hall,
who, after indulging his satirical vein, especially against Roman
Catholics, in Mundus alter et idem (1605), had devoted himself to
the production of moral and religious treatises. He published a
third series of Meditations and Vowes in 1606, and then settled on
the Theophrastian character sketch as a means of putting religious
problems in a practical light. In 1608 appeared Characters of
Virtues and Vices, an attempt to bring home to men's conviction
the nobleness of virtue and the baseness of vice. Nothing illus-
trates more clearly how tentative was the progress of social litera-
ture. Theophrastus had aimed at reproducing the humorous
.
sidel of social faults, Hall employs his method to expound the
practice of a moral system. The first book of characters, The
Characterisms of Virtue, all exemplify in different forms an ideal of
spiritual aloofness and self-mastery amid the errors and turmoil of
the age. This stoic doctrine in a Christian setting is seen not less
clearly in 'The Humble Man,' who can be more ashamed of honour
than grieved with contempt, because he thinks that causeless, this
deserved,' than in 'The Happy Man,' who ‘knows the world and
cares not for it; that, after many traverses of thought is grown to
know what he may trust to and stands now equally armed for all
events? ' But the character sketch was intended to describe action,
and Hall forces it to portray a state of mind. Thus, though there
are passages of a noble and restrained eloquence, the general
effect is wearisome and monotonous.
1 Vide intro. to The Characters of Theophrastus, English translation and revised
text, by Sir R. C. Jebb, re-edited by J. E. Sandy8, 1909.
9 The desire for stoic consistency was a feature of this unsettled age. Cf. Hamlet's
Give me the man that is not passion's slave,' and Ben Jonson's Discoveries, De sibi
molestis.
6
## p. 337 (#359) ############################################
The Man in the Moone
337
>
The second book, The Characterisms of Vices, has a no less
didactic purpose. But its object is to render vice despicable, and
Hall has, perforce, interwoven his descriptions with illustrations of
the complex follies and errors of his time. Thus, the second series
of characters, if less artistically perfect, serves a higher purpose and
embraces a wider field than the work of Theophrastus. We read
of frauds, superstitions, conspiracies, libels and lampoons, vain doc-
trines and reckless extravagance. Perhaps the best piece is the
character of The Ambitious Man,' in which we have an arraign-
ment of court life. The scornful irony of Virgidemiarum is revived
in the portrait of the courtier, a slave to all those who can advance
him, cleaving like a burr to a great man's coat, and, when accom-
panied by a friend from the country, crowding into the awful
presence,' in order to be seen talking with the mightiest in the
land.
But, in adapting Greek form to modern ideas, Hall has modified
the technique. As his subject has grown more complex, the initial
definition is refined into a conceit which implies more, though it
says less. For instance, 'The Patient Man’ is made of metal not
so hard as flexible,' superstition ‘is godless religion, devout impiety. '
The idea thus hinted at in a paradox, after careful elaboration, is
rounded off in an epigrammatic summary, whereas each chapter in
Theophrastus terminated abruptly.
Another indication of the new tendency is found in The Man
in the Moone, a popular treatise on practical morality composed
by W. M. in 1609. A belated traveller is represented as receiving
hospitality one night from the typical wise man of romance, a
venerable hermit who has seen all the world and contemns its
vanity. Thirty years earlier, such a situation would have de-
veloped into a dialogue full of confessions, apostrophes and
homilies. But, instead of a euphuistic disquisition, we learn that
the wise man is regarded as a magician, and that folks are coming
to have their fortunes told.
A stripling opens the gate and
describes the appearance of each visitor-drunkard, glutton,
usurer, lover, tobacconist (tobacco-smoker) and parasite. An elder
youth stands by the philosopher and delineates each character;
the old man, as fortune teller, predicts the consequences of
the enquirer's way of living. This triple method of portraiture
betrays no direct imitation, though some hints may have been
drawn from the character-sketches in Cynthia’s Revels. But so
descriptive an examination of well-doing and ill-doing would hardly
I. L. IV.
22
-
CH. XVI.
## p. 338 (#360) ############################################
338
London and Popular Literature
have been possible unless Hall had shown from Theophrastus how
much personal details signify in morality,
Meanwhile, the character sketch was assuming a new aspect in
the aristocratic circles of London. The period had come when
a number of courtiers, who were also scholars and men of the
world, were using their position to introduce among the ruling
classes more cultured' habits of thought and expression. A move-
ment was on foot, similar to that which Mme de Rambouillet
was soon to lead in France. English humanists had no salons
to which they could retreat from friction with the outer world, and
where intercourse with ladies could change in one generation from
insipid adulation to an artistic accomplishment. They cherished a
literary life of their own, and they used the Theophrastian character
sketch to draw attention to what was sordid or material both
within the court and without. These compositions were an amuse-
ment, at first privately circulated. None the less, they en-
couraged and interested people in conversational style and, by
emphasising the imperfections of others, raised their ideal for
themselves.
Sir Thomas Overbury was a prominent figure in this society,
and, after his death, twenty-one characters were added to the
second edition of his poem A Wife (1614), some by himself and
others by his friends, as the title admits. The collection, in its
final form, must have been largely the work of amateurs who had
come under Overbury's influence as a lover of culture. Their
publications were a tribute to the name of the man who had
practised and, perhaps, introduced the art, and the interest
aroused in his death would ensure a good sale. The volume
contains three distinct styles of character sketch : the eulogistic,
the satirical and the humorous. But, among variations of detail,
the whole series presents a unity not inconsistent with cooperation:
the review of society from the experienced courtier's point of
view. In the first place, we have a number of commendatory
portraits, which, unlike Hall's, are not spiritual studies, but
examples of how 'a worthy commander in the warres' would act
who knows the hazard of battle, never pardons a mistake in the
field and despises calumny. Or, it is a model of 'A noble and
retired house-keeper' (landed gentleman), still cherishing a spirit
of old-fashioned hospitality in a country seat whose Gothic archi-
tecture will ‘outlast much of our new fantasticall building. Or,
best of all, a 'franklin,' who withstands the modern scramble for
## p. 339 (#361) ############################################
>
The Overbury Characters 339
wealth, never goes to law, does not evict tenants to enclose pastures
and, despite the puritans, would approve of king James's per-
mission' for dancing in the churchyard after evensong. Or, lastly,
'An excellent actor,' one of the earliest and most successful
attempts to place that profession among the fine arts, in the
teeth of calumny.
But class spirit becomes more evident in the satirical portrait.
A series of sketches expose, with the bitterest caricature, the
shifts and antics of the upstart courtier: his meanness, servility
and sordid materialism. Even The Dissembler' is no longer a
mere transgressor against good faith, but a diplomatist who ‘baits
craft with humility. . . and of the humours of men weaves a net for
occasion. When character beyond the pale of the court is studied,
it is the obstinate narrowness, the hostility to the refinements of a
liberal education, among the inns of court, the university or the
country gentry, which are emphasised? This bias is best illustrated
by the character of 'An hypocrite,' which begins with an analysis
of the type on broad lines, but soon parrows into a pamphleteering
attack on the puritan, who condemns the culture of the age as
'vaine ostentation,' revolts against all authority of church or king
and yet exacts not only maintenance and obedience but even
admiration from the sect over which he tyrannises.
These sketches and descriptions follow the Theophrastian tech-
nique, but the style is highly coloured by a conversational element.
Wit, as we have seen, consisted largely in extracting imagery or
allusion out of the most prosaic or even sordid topics, and defini-
tions of types offered an excellent field for elaborate comparisons
and imaginative paraphrases.
It is true that, in portraying the
middle-class types who opposed their ideals, the display of wit
was somewhat hampered by the bitterness of the satire. But
courtiers and humanists found free scope for their fanciful clever-
ness in describing the humbler walks of life. We have
We have a number
of lighter pieces, which turn into merriment the most ordinary of
occupations. Thus, we learn that a tinker'g* . conversation is un-
reprovable for hee is ever mending'; and that a French cook,
with his attractive dishes made out of slender materials, 'is the
1 The King's Majesties Declaration to his subjects concerning Lawful Sports to be
used, 1618; rptd Social England Illustrated, intro. by A. Lang, 1903.
? Vide 'A Courtier,' 'An Ignorant Glory-hunter,' 'A Timist,' 'An Intruder into
favour. '
3 Vide 'A country gentleman,' 'An elder brother,' 'A meere common lawyer,'
"A meere scholar,' 'A meere fellow of an house. '
• By J. Cocke, added to the 6th impression.
6
6
22-2
## p. 340 (#362) ############################################
340 London and Popular Literature
last relic of popery, that makes men fast against their conscience. "
A humorous connection is also traced between a man's occupation
and his habit of thought. 'An Ingrosser of corn' hates tobacco
(a supposed substitute for food), and a sexton cannot endure to be
told that 'we ought to live by the quick not the dead. ' Thus, we
see that the humour of earlier and simpler generations still survived
in conversational literature. These periphrases, double meanings
and obliquities of expression sometimes resemble the scholarly
puns of the Italian Latinists; but we must also remember that, in a
more ingenuous form, they were the essence of the Tudor books of
riddles? Overbury's chapters on 'A very Woman' and 'Her next
part’ read like a continuation of the medieval controversy on women
which the author of The Schole-howse of Women had revived? .
The character of 'An ordinary Widdow' is one of the most studied
in the book, yet the witticisms are but brilliant variations on a
standing joke which appears in A C. Mery Talys, The Boke of
Mayd Emlyn, and The Wife of Bath's Prologue.
Besides involved and artificial pleasantry, the Overbury collec-
tion is already touched with an air of supercilious mockery which,
later, was to become the characteristic of court life. A different
line of development is traceable in another miscellany published
by a young lawyer, John Stephens, in 1615, together with prose
and verse essays entitled Satyrical essayes, characters and others,
and followed, in the same year, by a second series? . In these
two collections, after conventional sets of commendatory por-
traits, and a number of legal characters adorned with the usual
style of conceit, we find a few sketches inspired by a wider and
more independent curiosity in life. To begin with, some of the
definitions show a less affected interest in men and women. For
instance, Overbury had enlarged on 'An Apparatour' as 'A chicke
of the egge abuse, hatcht by the warmth of authority. ' Stephens
explains an informer as 'A protected cheater or a knave in
authority'; and there is insight as well as wit in his characterisation
of a churl as “the superfluity of solemne behaviour. But the
chief importance of Stephens's work lies in the fact that, now and
then, he discovers the individual beneath the type. His picture of
'A Ranke Observer' is not a typical detractor, but a man who
mockingly cultivates the faults he notes in his friends till they
become second nature in himself. 'A Gossip' and 'An Old Woman'
are not invectives, but sketches, full of personal observation as
1 Ante, vol. III, chap. v, p. 95.
3 Ibid. pp. 89-91; bibl. 485—487.
Vide bibl.
## p. 341 (#363) ############################################
>
Stephens and Earle
341
vivacious as Rowlands's Tis Merrie when Gossips meete. His
character of a page takes us behind the scenes, and shows to what
depravity lads were exposed at court. In 'two sketches, he
borders on the short story. One depicts 'A Begging Schollar,'
who, while at college, was nicknamed the 'Sharke,' and, being
expelled, wanders about the country consorting with vagrants,
preaching if an opportunity occurs. When admitted to a few nights'
hospitality, he steals the silver spoons. The other character is
'A Sicke Machiavell Pollititian,' that is to say, the insincere man
who, after posing all his life, is now face to face with the reality
of death.
But it was not in London that the character sketch reached its
fullest development. A number of manuscript portraits had been
in circulation for some years at Oxford, when Edward Blount printed
them in 1628 under the title Microcosmographie. It was after-
wards known that the collection was chiefly the work of John
Earle. These productions are composed with a more chastened
humour and in a more scholarly style than those of Hall, Overbury
or Stephens. Conceits, of course, are not wanting, and many of
the characters consist of jests and paradoxes invented out of
such familiar figures as a trumpeter, a sergeant, a carrier, or a
cook. Others, again, describe institutions, such as Wye Saltonstall
was afterwards to portray? And others have a satirical or con-
troversial purpose, coloured by the university point of view ? .
But Microcosmographie contains something beyond wit, style and
ephemeral satire. The other Theophrastians were exposing the
absurdities which rival classes always discover in each other, or,
at best, were analysing some type which creates interest because
conspicuous. But Earle, under the guise of character sketches,
enquires into the moral significance of the day's unrecorded words
and actions. He was one of the first writers who showed how
essential a part of the ordinary man's life is made up of trivial
and familiar things, and, consequently, how carefully these trifles
should be studied. Hence, he explains characters which seem so
colourless that they generally pass unnoticed. We have searching
1 Picturae loquentes or ictures drawn forth in characters (1630) (2nd ed. enlarged,
1635), contains, among other sketches, The World,' 'A Country Fair,' 'A country
ale-house,' 'A horse-race,' 'A Gentleman's house in the country. ' Earle has 'A
taverne,''A bowle alley,'. Paul's Walke,' . A prison. '
2 Earle's ‘A Downe-right Schollar' and 'A good old man'are answers to Overbury's
A meere Scholar' and · An olde man. ' Earle treats questions of university interest
in ‘A raw young preacher,' and his essay on 'A Scepticke in Religion' deals with the
difficulties of a student who hesitates between conflicting creeds.
6
&
## p. 342 (#364) ############################################
342 London and Popular Literature
a
>
analyses of such common-places as a child, a weak man, a mere
formal man, a plain country fellow, a modest man, a poor man and
a coward. Earle shows how a lack of vigilance in the veriest routine
of life ends in self-deception, error or discontent, and he constantly
draws a comparison between the judgment of wise men and that
passed by the common herd. His technique, roughly, is the same
as that of his predecessors, but his initial definitions are sometimes
more felicitous, and his conclusions sometimes break off with a
studied heedlessness more contemptuous than any invectivel
Hall, Overbury, Stephens and Earle completed the nationalisa-
tion of the Theophrastian character sketch. They were followed
by a host of imitators, of whom John Cleveland, Samuel Butler
and William Law were the greatest; and, from the time of the
Civil War, this type of literature became a recognised weapon
in party strife. Their work is important because it gave direction
and method to the study of character, and introduced a crisp,
concentrated style of description. They cannot be regarded as
having materially influenced the novel, because the Theophrastian
character sketch remained objective, but they supplemented, and,
in some measure, supplanted the drama, which is always hampered
in an age of class satire or political warfare. The beginning of a
more subjective treatment is marked by the publication of The
Wandering Jew (1649). This work is largely a reproduction of
The Man in the Moone, with the important difference that the
characters, besides being described, plead for themselves and thus
enlist our sympathies
The character sketch was mostly an attempt to ventilate the
newly roused interest in morals and manners. But, as we have
seen, its association with conversational preciousness often lowered
it to a mere triumph of paradox. Moreover, it did not fully meet
the needs of the age. As men became conscious of the growing
complexity of London life, they also grew conscious of a running
commentary on similar problems to be found in classical literature.
The humanists of court circles discovered lessons of statecraft and
diplomacy in Machiavelli and Tacitus, examples of daring and
fortitude in Plutarch, and hints for wit and courtesy in Castiglione,
Cicero and Suetonius. Such reading started new trains of thought
1 West's edition of Earle's Microcosmography, 1897, intro. p. xxviii
See bibl.
3 Cf. Raleigh's comparison between Overbury's Country Knight and Sir Roger de
Coverley, History oj' the English Novel, 1891, chap. v.
## p. 343 (#365) ############################################
Origins of the Essay
343
on topics too fleeting and miscellaneous to be classified in a
methodical discourse. But, unsystematised reflection was not
the creation of the Jacobean age. Caxton's prefaces have the
qualifications of essays in criticism. While the form and style
of the medieval Exempla were serving as models for Tudor
jest-books, the apologue tended to expand into a discussion?
The writings of Andrew Boorde and William Bullein are full of
digressions on the occasional interests of daily life, and Nashe's
tracts were practically a patchwork of miscellaneous notes and
observations. The character sketch was far too restricted and
too polemical to gratify this aptitude for desultory comment; but
men of a more contemplative and less satiric frame of mind? began
to jot down their reflections and thoughts, after the manner of
eligious meditations. This habit of thinking on paper rapidly
assumed importance among the intellectual coteries of London;
manuscripts were passed from hand to hand, and the more finished
and methodical commonplace books even found their way into
prints, following the example of Montaigne (1580), from whom they
took the name of 'essay. The new genre entered timidly on its
career, the very title being an apology for its informality and in-
completeness4. The first essayist who anonymously put forth
Remedies against Discontentment drawen into severall discourses
from the writinges of auncient philosophers, in 1596, explains, in
an introductory address, that they were 'onely framed for mine
owne private use; and that is the reason I tooke no great paine,
to set them foorth anye better'; and then, after speaking of the
great moralists of the past, he excuses his own work by adding
From these faire flowers, which their labours have afforded mee, I
have as I passed by, gathered this small heape, and as my time and
leasure served me, distilled them and kept them as precious. ' In
the following year, Bacon produced his slim pamphlet of Essayes.
Religious Meditations. Places of perswasion and disswasion, in
which, among ‘Meditationes sacrae' and 'The Coulers of good and
evill,' we have a number of maxims and directions jotted down
under ten headings, possibly suggested by lord Burghley's Precepts
1 Vide the concluding commentary attached to some of the anecdotes in Mery Tales
and Quicke Answers.
? Cf. the Theophrastians' merciless caricature of the gallant with Cornwallis's
essay on 'Fantasticnesse. '
3 See bibl.
• Essay from low Latin exagium a trial or testing, Italian saggio, Spanish ensayo,
French essai.
## p. 344 (#366) ############################################
344 London and Popular Literature
or Directions for the well ordering and carriage of a man's life'.
Bacon's essays have a narrow but practical scope. They virtually
recognise the courtier's career as a profession, and show how
health, wealth and even learning, must be directed to the develop-
ment of the special qualities necessary for success. Nay, more, his
reflections shed light on the management of men, and penetrate
the cross purposes and conflicting judgments which make up the
atmosphere of the court. This side of human nature was already
familiar to statesmen, but it had never before been discussed in
maxims and rules which, if terse to obscurity, nevertheless reveal
the basis of egoism underlying a maze of intrigues and shifting
reputations.
But the scope and range of the essay had not yet been dis-
covered. Bacon's first series must have appealed to men as a manual
of diplomacy, a kind of Complete Courtier; and, for this reason, Sir
William Cornwallis's work has an importance which its literary
merit would not have justified. He produced in 1600 and 1601
two sets of essays, with some of the diffuseness, but none of
the charm, of Montaigne. He, too, discussed problems of high
life, especially the means by which men rise to prominence or
favour; and, in many places, he gives the same advice as his more
illustrious predecessor. But he has introduced a personal touch
(also a feature of Montaigne) which was afterwards to become
a characteristic of the essay. His reflections are sometimes pre-
faced by curious confidences and self-revelations which give them
the air of a diary. Again, his outlook is wider. The study of
Plutarch's Lives had given him an admiration for manliness, wis-
dom and heroism, and he examines modern character and enter-
prise from this point of view; thus showing how to use the past as
a commentary on the present. And, above all, he formulates the
new ideal? of gentlemanly culture: the man of no special science
but of liberal interests, who can turn all kinds of books, even
nursery rimes and street ballads, to his profit", talk of horses and
See bibl. The Precepts were not printed at this time, but Bacon may well have
seen them in MS.
This conception did not originate with Cornwallis, but is found underlying Lyly's
Euphues and Ascham's definition of evpuns in the Scholemaster, 1570. Vide Elis. Crit.
Essays, vol. 1, p. 1. Perhaps Cornwallis took the idea straight from Montaigne Or à
cet apprentissage (=à bien juger et à bien parler) tout ce qui se presente à nos yeulx sert
de livre suffisant ; la malice d'un page, la sottise d'un valet, un propos de table ce sont
autant de nouvelles matières. ' Institution des Enfants.
3. Of Discourse,' Pt. I.
• Of the Observation and Use of things,' Pt. I.
6
## p. 345 (#367) ############################################
Cornwallis and Robert Johnson 345
>
hawks to those who understand nothing deeper, and use all know-
ledge 'to looke upon man? '
This conception of the honnête homme, formulated thirty years
before Faret's L'Art de plaire à la cour (1630), is the centre of
Robert Johnson's reflections, published as Essaies or Rather Im-
perfect Offers, in 1601. Education is, for him, merely the training
for action; affability3, the art of concealing offence; wisdom*, the
secret of successful statesmanship. His work is more direct and
educative than that of Cornwallis. Frequently, he gives rules for
self-training in special excellence, notably in the essay on ex-
perience", with its examination of the historical lessons to be
learnt from Tacitus. But he never loses sight of the humanist's
ideal of culture. He argues that learning is no inconvenience to
the soldier, but renders him more virtuous; and, while Ascham,
Greene, Nashe and Hall? were anathematising foreign travel,
Johnson advocates it in an essay from which Bacon was not
ashamed to borrow.
The essay was rapidly becoming, instead of an established form
of literature, a collection of notes and maxims. David Tuvill
used it wherein to display amazing familiarity with anecdotes
of Greek and Roman worthies in two garrulously discursive and
unpractical volumes. Before long, the practice of detached com-
position became the object of parody—the surest sign of recogni-
tion—in such productions as The Penniless Parliament of
Threadbare Poets (1608). It blended with the collections of
characters. In the fourth edition of Overbury's works (1614),
a number of witty and humorous essays on countries, manners
and customs were added in the form of Newes. ' John Stephens,
in 1615, coupled his Characters with some verse essays more or
less in the manner of Persius, and some serious prose reflections
full of quaint illustrations of thought, in which he discusses the
claims and responsibilities of high-birth, the need of paternal
kindness, the sin of 'disinheritance' and the lessons of sympathy
and kindness to be learnt from others' sorrow. Geffray Mynshul
'
employed both fashionable types, though both inadequately, to
expose the rapacity of jailors in Essayes and Characters of a
Prison and Prisoners (1618); Nicholas Breton endeavoured to
1
2 E88. III.
3 Ess. X.
+ Ess. IIV.
1 Of knowledge,' Pt. 11.
5 Ess, v.
6
6 Ess. VIII, 'Of Art Military. '
? Quo vadis ? A Just Censure of Travell, 1617.
8 Essaies politicke and morall, by D. T. Gent, 1608; Essayes morall and theologicall,
1609.
. Ante, p. 340.
## p. 346 (#368) ############################################
346
London and Popular Literature
-
fuse the two types into one in Characters upon Essays (1615).
He chose the topics already discussed by the essayists—wisdom,
knowledge, resolution, truth, death, fear-and, in each case, wove
a few commonplace ideas into an embroidery of antithesis and
metaphor. Each essay begins with a conceited definition, which
is elaborated by every artifice of paraphrase, and then relinquished
with an affectation of courtly indifference. Thus, the essay, which
had originated as a record of informal meditation, would probably
have degenerated, for several decades at least, into a mere literary
toy, unless Bacon had shown its true scope and capacity.
Bacon's virtue consists in his style and sagacity, which is all
the more penetrating because confined to a certain range of ideas.
In the edition of 1597, he had refrained from the ornaments of
diction to be found in his earlier works, apparently because the
essays were intended only as private notes for the perusal of a
few friends. But, by 1612, the popularity of the genre and his own
reputation as the inventor induced him to revise the first series
and add twenty-eight new essays in a smoother, less jejune style.
By 1625, his final edition was complete. This collection contains
fifty-eight essays, written with a perfect mastery of language in
a spirit of superb confidence ?
The true importance of his style is to be found in its preg-
nancy. In an age of complicated and superficial verbiage, he
turns the licence of imaginative and allusive expression into
an instrument of accurate and chastened thought. Character
writers had introduced their portraits with a pointed or fanciful
definition. Bacon does the same, but so as to express an abstract
idea in the commonest objects of sight and experience. Thus,
Men in great place are thrice servants,' 'Fortune is like the
market,'Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set,' 'Praise is the
reflection of virtue,' 'He that hath wife and children hath given
hostages to fortune. ' These appeals for confirmation to everyday
facts run all through his essays. Selfish statesmen are compared
to ants in an orchard; men are bettered by believing in a God,
as a dog when he owns a master. Again, though he never con-
descends to convince, his oracular utterances are the fruit of
minute calculation ; and this scientific process appears in the
almost judicial balancing of pros and contras, as in the essay, 'Of
1 'I have read of many essays and a kind of charactering of them, by such, as when
I looked into the form and nature of their writing, I have been of the conceit that they
were but imitators of your breaking the ice to their inventions. ' Nicholas Breton,
dedication to Bacon in Characters upon Essays.
2 Vide S. H. Reynolds, intro. to Essays or Counsels of Francis.
6
a
## p. 347 (#369) ############################################
Bacon
347
Usury,' or in the methodical and detailed directions which he gives,
as in the essay Of Travel. ' His logical habit of mind has trans-
'
formed even the materials of pedantry. The numerous quota-
tions and illustrations drawn from the Bible, the classics and
Machiavelli, seem necessary to his argument, and his unacknow-
ledged appropriations from Montaigne strike one as mere coinci-
dences of thought. All forms of knowledge are subjected to the
elucidation of his views on life. The primum mobile of astronomy
illustrates “the motions of the greatest persons in a government,'
and the legend of Briareus is interpreted as an emblem of the
people's power
These excellencies were largely due to the fact that Bacon
regarded the popularity of the Essays as ephemeral and was
not posing for posterity? He wrote down simply the things which
interested himself. This spontaneity carried its own limitations.
at the gates but, like Maevius's Italianate poetry, all is showy with-
out but empty within. No smoke comes from the chimneys, the
sign of old-fashioned hospitality. The truth is that hunger and
death are now abroad, and the rich, who should make head against
them, have fled, leaving the poor to bear the brunt.
Although Hall's moral earnestness found few imitators in verse
satire, others were not slow to recognise the possibilities of Juve-
nalian invective as a literary exercise. Edward Guilpin produced
a volume entitled Skialetheia or A Shadowe of Truth (1598), pos-
sibly influenced by Du Bartas's Semaines“, in which he vigorously
protested against the emasculated poetry of his age, and claimed
that satires and epigrams were the only antidote. John Marston,
in the same year, coupled a very erotic poem, The Meta-
morphosis of Pygmalion's Image, with Certaine Satyres, which
were probably composed in haste to keep up with the new
1 Bk. iv, Sat. 11.
2 Ibid. Sat. iv.
* See bibl.
• Translated that year into English by Joshua Sylvester.
## p. 332 (#354) ############################################
332 London and Popular Literature
1
6
trend of literary taste. The work of both writers bears the mark
of academic fabrication. Yet both are unmistakably influenced
by the London around them. These satires are not moral de-
nunciations, but studies in hypocrisy, affectation and compromise
-vices peculiar to urban society—which they illustrate with life-
like silhouettes culled from the court, the ordinary, the street and
the aisle of St Paul's. Marston adds zest to these character
sketches by a literary controversy with Hall, who had satirised him
as Labeo? ; and, next year, abandoning love poetry once for all, he
produced another volume of satires, The Scourge of Villanie
(1599), in which the hypocrisy of the sensualist is exhibited in
its most offensive forms. The tract is memorable for an essay in
criticism' and a 'Dunciad’ combined, in the sixth satire. After in-
geniously accounting for The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion as an
object-lesson against erotic verse, Marston turns on his literary con-
frères, ridiculing the invocations of some, the dreams and visions
of others and the bathos to which the over-inspired descend. The
critics are even more contemptible. When Capro approves, we
know that he has found a line which 'incends his lustful blood';
Muto, the fop, admires what he cannot understand ; Friscus, in
criticising a book, always pretends to recognise passages from
Horace and Juvenal, though he has never read a line of either.
In these and similar productions, scurrility was rapidly becoming
an end and object in itself. The spirit of the Tudor 'flytings,'
which had reappeared in the Marprelate controversy and the
Harvey-Nashe feud, was now taking yet another lease of life
under the stimulating influence of Roman satire. But the licensers
became alarmed at this recrudescence of envy and hatred, and,
before the end of 1599, an order was issued to suppress the
offensive works of Nashe, Harvey, Hall, Guilpin, Marston and
others? However, the edict by no means brought peace and
goodwill into literature. A 'flyting' arose over The Scourge of
Villanie within two years of its suppression, and gladiatorial
combats continued, in the world of letters, to be the recognised
resource of the intellectually unemployed.
But, quite apart from personal animosity, formal satire was
bound to thrive among the upper classes. As we have seen, this
form of classical imitation originated in a reaction from love
poetry, but its subsequent developments were due to a deeper
movement. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, a sense
1 Bk. Ili, Sat. x.
? See bibl. for particulars of the edict.
3 See bibl. under Flytings.
## p. 333 (#355) ############################################
( Humours'
333
of disillusionment was pervading the nation, caused, partly, by the
corruption of the governing classes, and, even more, by the bitter
social and religious antagonisms among the people themselves.
They began to lose faith in high ideals and heroic sentiments, and,
as the passions and deeds of men lost their hold on the imagina-
tion, the petty curiosities and materialised interests, inseparable
from city life, came out of the shadow. Attention was drawn
more and more to the commonplace side of human nature. This
tendency is already noticeable in Nashe, and, by the death of
Elizabeth, the moods and idiosyncrasies of people were becoming
the commonest themes of creative literature. As the physicians
had explained temperament to be dependent on the predominance
of one of the four humours or moistures-phlegm, blood, choler
and melancholy-which pervaded the physiology of man, it became
fashionable to dignify any mental characteristic or even pose with
the name of humour,' and to deem the most miserable affectations
worthy of literary comment!
The debasement of thought was accompanied by a growing
preoccupation in form and style. Seneca's maxim in hoc omnis
hyperbole extenditur ut ad verum mendacio perveniat began to be
universally abused. It will be pointed out elsewhere how this
decadence affected the theatre and caused the unsympathetic and
exaggerated portrayal of types to take the place of the humour
and pathos of incident. But it concerns us to notice here that
this artificiality of sentiment and expression, which caused the
decay of comedy, stimulated an enormous output of tractarian
literature. A vast number of miscellaneous pamphlets began to
appear. They treated the 'humours' of men hardly less effectively
than the theatre, and they offered endless opportunity for experi-
ments in style and classical imitation which the theatre did not
offer.
Juvenalian satire fell under this influence and became a fashion.
A large number of writers wrote in this style with elaborate and
suggestive titles? . Even R. C. , author of The Times Whistle, chose
the decasyllabic couplet as the vehicle for his homilies on such
subjects as atheism, pride, avarice, gluttony and lasciviousness.
His moralisations, like some of George Wither's, are unsuited to
1 Vide Shadwell, The Humourists, Epilogue; Ben Jonson, Every Man out of his
Humour, The Induction and The Magnetic Lady, introduction; John Marston, Scourge
of Villanie, Sat. &; S. Rowlands, The Letting of Humors Blood, Epig. 27; Nym bope-
lessly misuses the word : vide H. B. Wheatley, intro. to Merry Wives, 1886. Also
N. & Q. Ser. x, vol. xi, Feb. 20, 1909.
2 See bibl. under Satire.
## p. 334 (#356) ############################################
334
London and Popular Literature
dramatic form, but so vitalising was the study of London 'humours,'
that, while his denunciations of the more heinous vices are dull to
the extreme, his character sketches of men's weaknesses and
affectations are bright and vivid'.
At the end of the sixteenth century, it was discovered that the
abnormalities and eccentricities of conduct about which men
laughed and talked, rather than waxed indignant, could be best
portrayed by some detached, fragmentary form of composition,
and imitation of the Latin epigram became the rage. This interest
in human peculiarities and oddities dates from the production of
Mery Tales and Quicke Answers, and the new departure in
classicism impoverished the development of the jest-books as well
as of the drama. Even at that period, John Heywood had
embodied this type of anecdote in fragments of rough verse which
his publishers chose to call epigrams? , and Robert Crowley had
issued sallies of moral and social satire under the same name?
But the progress of civilisation and the growth of London had
made character far more complex, and the taste for literary form,
coupled with increasing social intercourse, had prepared men of
culture for the pointed Latin epigram which had already been
refined into a subtle but formidable weapon by the Italians from
the days of Pius II to Leo X (1458—1522). Sir John Harington
and Sir John Davies were among the first who adapted
this type to English uses, and they were followed by Thomas
Bastard (1597), John Weever (1598) and Samuel Rowlands (1600).
After the accession of James, Catullus and Martial were imitated
as frequently as Juvenal, and were preferred by those who realised
that 'humours' were a theme for the witticisms of conversation
rather than for the tirades of a moralist. John Davies of Hereford
was, perhaps, the most typical. In 1610 he brought out The
Scourge of Folly, depicting such social offences as Fuscus's
boorishness", Gorgonius's slovenly appearance", Brunnus's unctuous
manners and Classus's loquacity? . But the epigram, then as
always an offspring of social intercourse, must culminate in a
conceit, and Davies frequently relinquishes the scourging of folly
merely to present a play of paradox or fancy. In parting
company with satire, the epigram came to rely more on the
1 Vide satires Against shamıs' and 'Against pride. '
• See bibl.
3 The One and Thirty Epigrams, 1560.
4 Epig. 8.
* Epig. 101.
6 Epig. 1 or 2.
7 Epig. 263.
8 Cf. Epig. 176, comparing a gamester to the ivy which first loosens the masonry,
grows over and then holds it together, as a gambler does his estate.
a
## p. 335 (#357) ############################################
Epigram and Character Sketch
335
artifices of literary form, and its votaries, however frivolous their
theme, helped to prepare the age of Addison and Pope by
recognising the importance of workmanship and cultivating the
niceties of expression!
Bastard's work and that of Davies mark the stage when litera-
ture was being cultivated as a social art. The epigram has all the
atmosphere of a coterie. It is conceived in a lighter vein, it is
suited to the eccentricities, not the degradation, of character;
it adorns everyday interests with the charm of literary form ;
it is a detached fragmentary production convenient for circula-
tion. But, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, it was
discovered that the Theophrastian character sketch fulfilled all
these conditions, offered greater scope to the play of conversa-
tional idiom, gave the sanction of classical form to the age's love
of portrait-writing and, in some measure, satisfied the interests
which it was the function of the stage to gratify.
In order to understand the influence of Theophrastus, it must
be remembered that his life falls into the period 373—284 B. C. ,
when the Athenian commonwealth was a community of burghers,
all educated in the same manner, dressed in the same style and
occupied in the same pursuits. Their lives were not, apparently,
much complicated by political strife, commercial expansion, or
religious controversy. Hence, the moral and ethical differences of
men were noticeable only in the common traffic of existence, and
study of character became a close attention to details of conduct.
Theophrastus, probably under the inspiration of Aristotle, dis-
cusses about thirty cases in which men vary from normal perfection.
This variation he does not find in their appearance, dress or thoughts,
but in one side of their habitual conduct. A sketch or description
from this point of view requires a special technique. Theophrastus
begins each essay by briefly defining the quality under discussion-
be it irony, avarice, boorishness, or stupidity-and then illustrates
the definition by a number of typical actions. As the actions have no
necessary connection with each other, but are drawn from any kind
of situation, in which the particular propensity will betray itself,
the portraits may fairly claim to be generic. As the instances and
anecdotes are within the range of everyone's daily experience,
the portraits have a touch of reality. Now, character sketches, as
1 Cf. Epig. 106, which is practically a paraphrase of one of Bastard's on the
slowness of his composition.
Vide • The Analyses of Character' in Ethics, Bk. iv and Rhetoric, Bk. II.
## p. 336 (#358) ############################################
336 London and Popular Literature
we have seen, were already a common feature of English social
literature. But they were accidental productions subordinated to
the main interests of a connected work, produced without method,
overladen with non-essentials, or disfigured by gross caricature.
Theophrastus introduced three changes. He raised the character
sketch to the dignity of an independent creation, containing its
own interest within itself; he emphasised action as the essence of
such description; he provided a stereotyped technique. This
genre, the product of a simpler civilisation, but a more mature
literary art, was quickly adopted by the writers of the age and
transformed into a vehicle for ideas far beyond the dreams of the
inventor.
The first printed adaptation came from the pen of Joseph Hall,
who, after indulging his satirical vein, especially against Roman
Catholics, in Mundus alter et idem (1605), had devoted himself to
the production of moral and religious treatises. He published a
third series of Meditations and Vowes in 1606, and then settled on
the Theophrastian character sketch as a means of putting religious
problems in a practical light. In 1608 appeared Characters of
Virtues and Vices, an attempt to bring home to men's conviction
the nobleness of virtue and the baseness of vice. Nothing illus-
trates more clearly how tentative was the progress of social litera-
ture. Theophrastus had aimed at reproducing the humorous
.
sidel of social faults, Hall employs his method to expound the
practice of a moral system. The first book of characters, The
Characterisms of Virtue, all exemplify in different forms an ideal of
spiritual aloofness and self-mastery amid the errors and turmoil of
the age. This stoic doctrine in a Christian setting is seen not less
clearly in 'The Humble Man,' who can be more ashamed of honour
than grieved with contempt, because he thinks that causeless, this
deserved,' than in 'The Happy Man,' who ‘knows the world and
cares not for it; that, after many traverses of thought is grown to
know what he may trust to and stands now equally armed for all
events? ' But the character sketch was intended to describe action,
and Hall forces it to portray a state of mind. Thus, though there
are passages of a noble and restrained eloquence, the general
effect is wearisome and monotonous.
1 Vide intro. to The Characters of Theophrastus, English translation and revised
text, by Sir R. C. Jebb, re-edited by J. E. Sandy8, 1909.
9 The desire for stoic consistency was a feature of this unsettled age. Cf. Hamlet's
Give me the man that is not passion's slave,' and Ben Jonson's Discoveries, De sibi
molestis.
6
## p. 337 (#359) ############################################
The Man in the Moone
337
>
The second book, The Characterisms of Vices, has a no less
didactic purpose. But its object is to render vice despicable, and
Hall has, perforce, interwoven his descriptions with illustrations of
the complex follies and errors of his time. Thus, the second series
of characters, if less artistically perfect, serves a higher purpose and
embraces a wider field than the work of Theophrastus. We read
of frauds, superstitions, conspiracies, libels and lampoons, vain doc-
trines and reckless extravagance. Perhaps the best piece is the
character of The Ambitious Man,' in which we have an arraign-
ment of court life. The scornful irony of Virgidemiarum is revived
in the portrait of the courtier, a slave to all those who can advance
him, cleaving like a burr to a great man's coat, and, when accom-
panied by a friend from the country, crowding into the awful
presence,' in order to be seen talking with the mightiest in the
land.
But, in adapting Greek form to modern ideas, Hall has modified
the technique. As his subject has grown more complex, the initial
definition is refined into a conceit which implies more, though it
says less. For instance, 'The Patient Man’ is made of metal not
so hard as flexible,' superstition ‘is godless religion, devout impiety. '
The idea thus hinted at in a paradox, after careful elaboration, is
rounded off in an epigrammatic summary, whereas each chapter in
Theophrastus terminated abruptly.
Another indication of the new tendency is found in The Man
in the Moone, a popular treatise on practical morality composed
by W. M. in 1609. A belated traveller is represented as receiving
hospitality one night from the typical wise man of romance, a
venerable hermit who has seen all the world and contemns its
vanity. Thirty years earlier, such a situation would have de-
veloped into a dialogue full of confessions, apostrophes and
homilies. But, instead of a euphuistic disquisition, we learn that
the wise man is regarded as a magician, and that folks are coming
to have their fortunes told.
A stripling opens the gate and
describes the appearance of each visitor-drunkard, glutton,
usurer, lover, tobacconist (tobacco-smoker) and parasite. An elder
youth stands by the philosopher and delineates each character;
the old man, as fortune teller, predicts the consequences of
the enquirer's way of living. This triple method of portraiture
betrays no direct imitation, though some hints may have been
drawn from the character-sketches in Cynthia’s Revels. But so
descriptive an examination of well-doing and ill-doing would hardly
I. L. IV.
22
-
CH. XVI.
## p. 338 (#360) ############################################
338
London and Popular Literature
have been possible unless Hall had shown from Theophrastus how
much personal details signify in morality,
Meanwhile, the character sketch was assuming a new aspect in
the aristocratic circles of London. The period had come when
a number of courtiers, who were also scholars and men of the
world, were using their position to introduce among the ruling
classes more cultured' habits of thought and expression. A move-
ment was on foot, similar to that which Mme de Rambouillet
was soon to lead in France. English humanists had no salons
to which they could retreat from friction with the outer world, and
where intercourse with ladies could change in one generation from
insipid adulation to an artistic accomplishment. They cherished a
literary life of their own, and they used the Theophrastian character
sketch to draw attention to what was sordid or material both
within the court and without. These compositions were an amuse-
ment, at first privately circulated. None the less, they en-
couraged and interested people in conversational style and, by
emphasising the imperfections of others, raised their ideal for
themselves.
Sir Thomas Overbury was a prominent figure in this society,
and, after his death, twenty-one characters were added to the
second edition of his poem A Wife (1614), some by himself and
others by his friends, as the title admits. The collection, in its
final form, must have been largely the work of amateurs who had
come under Overbury's influence as a lover of culture. Their
publications were a tribute to the name of the man who had
practised and, perhaps, introduced the art, and the interest
aroused in his death would ensure a good sale. The volume
contains three distinct styles of character sketch : the eulogistic,
the satirical and the humorous. But, among variations of detail,
the whole series presents a unity not inconsistent with cooperation:
the review of society from the experienced courtier's point of
view. In the first place, we have a number of commendatory
portraits, which, unlike Hall's, are not spiritual studies, but
examples of how 'a worthy commander in the warres' would act
who knows the hazard of battle, never pardons a mistake in the
field and despises calumny. Or, it is a model of 'A noble and
retired house-keeper' (landed gentleman), still cherishing a spirit
of old-fashioned hospitality in a country seat whose Gothic archi-
tecture will ‘outlast much of our new fantasticall building. Or,
best of all, a 'franklin,' who withstands the modern scramble for
## p. 339 (#361) ############################################
>
The Overbury Characters 339
wealth, never goes to law, does not evict tenants to enclose pastures
and, despite the puritans, would approve of king James's per-
mission' for dancing in the churchyard after evensong. Or, lastly,
'An excellent actor,' one of the earliest and most successful
attempts to place that profession among the fine arts, in the
teeth of calumny.
But class spirit becomes more evident in the satirical portrait.
A series of sketches expose, with the bitterest caricature, the
shifts and antics of the upstart courtier: his meanness, servility
and sordid materialism. Even The Dissembler' is no longer a
mere transgressor against good faith, but a diplomatist who ‘baits
craft with humility. . . and of the humours of men weaves a net for
occasion. When character beyond the pale of the court is studied,
it is the obstinate narrowness, the hostility to the refinements of a
liberal education, among the inns of court, the university or the
country gentry, which are emphasised? This bias is best illustrated
by the character of 'An hypocrite,' which begins with an analysis
of the type on broad lines, but soon parrows into a pamphleteering
attack on the puritan, who condemns the culture of the age as
'vaine ostentation,' revolts against all authority of church or king
and yet exacts not only maintenance and obedience but even
admiration from the sect over which he tyrannises.
These sketches and descriptions follow the Theophrastian tech-
nique, but the style is highly coloured by a conversational element.
Wit, as we have seen, consisted largely in extracting imagery or
allusion out of the most prosaic or even sordid topics, and defini-
tions of types offered an excellent field for elaborate comparisons
and imaginative paraphrases.
It is true that, in portraying the
middle-class types who opposed their ideals, the display of wit
was somewhat hampered by the bitterness of the satire. But
courtiers and humanists found free scope for their fanciful clever-
ness in describing the humbler walks of life. We have
We have a number
of lighter pieces, which turn into merriment the most ordinary of
occupations. Thus, we learn that a tinker'g* . conversation is un-
reprovable for hee is ever mending'; and that a French cook,
with his attractive dishes made out of slender materials, 'is the
1 The King's Majesties Declaration to his subjects concerning Lawful Sports to be
used, 1618; rptd Social England Illustrated, intro. by A. Lang, 1903.
? Vide 'A Courtier,' 'An Ignorant Glory-hunter,' 'A Timist,' 'An Intruder into
favour. '
3 Vide 'A country gentleman,' 'An elder brother,' 'A meere common lawyer,'
"A meere scholar,' 'A meere fellow of an house. '
• By J. Cocke, added to the 6th impression.
6
6
22-2
## p. 340 (#362) ############################################
340 London and Popular Literature
last relic of popery, that makes men fast against their conscience. "
A humorous connection is also traced between a man's occupation
and his habit of thought. 'An Ingrosser of corn' hates tobacco
(a supposed substitute for food), and a sexton cannot endure to be
told that 'we ought to live by the quick not the dead. ' Thus, we
see that the humour of earlier and simpler generations still survived
in conversational literature. These periphrases, double meanings
and obliquities of expression sometimes resemble the scholarly
puns of the Italian Latinists; but we must also remember that, in a
more ingenuous form, they were the essence of the Tudor books of
riddles? Overbury's chapters on 'A very Woman' and 'Her next
part’ read like a continuation of the medieval controversy on women
which the author of The Schole-howse of Women had revived? .
The character of 'An ordinary Widdow' is one of the most studied
in the book, yet the witticisms are but brilliant variations on a
standing joke which appears in A C. Mery Talys, The Boke of
Mayd Emlyn, and The Wife of Bath's Prologue.
Besides involved and artificial pleasantry, the Overbury collec-
tion is already touched with an air of supercilious mockery which,
later, was to become the characteristic of court life. A different
line of development is traceable in another miscellany published
by a young lawyer, John Stephens, in 1615, together with prose
and verse essays entitled Satyrical essayes, characters and others,
and followed, in the same year, by a second series? . In these
two collections, after conventional sets of commendatory por-
traits, and a number of legal characters adorned with the usual
style of conceit, we find a few sketches inspired by a wider and
more independent curiosity in life. To begin with, some of the
definitions show a less affected interest in men and women. For
instance, Overbury had enlarged on 'An Apparatour' as 'A chicke
of the egge abuse, hatcht by the warmth of authority. ' Stephens
explains an informer as 'A protected cheater or a knave in
authority'; and there is insight as well as wit in his characterisation
of a churl as “the superfluity of solemne behaviour. But the
chief importance of Stephens's work lies in the fact that, now and
then, he discovers the individual beneath the type. His picture of
'A Ranke Observer' is not a typical detractor, but a man who
mockingly cultivates the faults he notes in his friends till they
become second nature in himself. 'A Gossip' and 'An Old Woman'
are not invectives, but sketches, full of personal observation as
1 Ante, vol. III, chap. v, p. 95.
3 Ibid. pp. 89-91; bibl. 485—487.
Vide bibl.
## p. 341 (#363) ############################################
>
Stephens and Earle
341
vivacious as Rowlands's Tis Merrie when Gossips meete. His
character of a page takes us behind the scenes, and shows to what
depravity lads were exposed at court. In 'two sketches, he
borders on the short story. One depicts 'A Begging Schollar,'
who, while at college, was nicknamed the 'Sharke,' and, being
expelled, wanders about the country consorting with vagrants,
preaching if an opportunity occurs. When admitted to a few nights'
hospitality, he steals the silver spoons. The other character is
'A Sicke Machiavell Pollititian,' that is to say, the insincere man
who, after posing all his life, is now face to face with the reality
of death.
But it was not in London that the character sketch reached its
fullest development. A number of manuscript portraits had been
in circulation for some years at Oxford, when Edward Blount printed
them in 1628 under the title Microcosmographie. It was after-
wards known that the collection was chiefly the work of John
Earle. These productions are composed with a more chastened
humour and in a more scholarly style than those of Hall, Overbury
or Stephens. Conceits, of course, are not wanting, and many of
the characters consist of jests and paradoxes invented out of
such familiar figures as a trumpeter, a sergeant, a carrier, or a
cook. Others, again, describe institutions, such as Wye Saltonstall
was afterwards to portray? And others have a satirical or con-
troversial purpose, coloured by the university point of view ? .
But Microcosmographie contains something beyond wit, style and
ephemeral satire. The other Theophrastians were exposing the
absurdities which rival classes always discover in each other, or,
at best, were analysing some type which creates interest because
conspicuous. But Earle, under the guise of character sketches,
enquires into the moral significance of the day's unrecorded words
and actions. He was one of the first writers who showed how
essential a part of the ordinary man's life is made up of trivial
and familiar things, and, consequently, how carefully these trifles
should be studied. Hence, he explains characters which seem so
colourless that they generally pass unnoticed. We have searching
1 Picturae loquentes or ictures drawn forth in characters (1630) (2nd ed. enlarged,
1635), contains, among other sketches, The World,' 'A Country Fair,' 'A country
ale-house,' 'A horse-race,' 'A Gentleman's house in the country. ' Earle has 'A
taverne,''A bowle alley,'. Paul's Walke,' . A prison. '
2 Earle's ‘A Downe-right Schollar' and 'A good old man'are answers to Overbury's
A meere Scholar' and · An olde man. ' Earle treats questions of university interest
in ‘A raw young preacher,' and his essay on 'A Scepticke in Religion' deals with the
difficulties of a student who hesitates between conflicting creeds.
6
&
## p. 342 (#364) ############################################
342 London and Popular Literature
a
>
analyses of such common-places as a child, a weak man, a mere
formal man, a plain country fellow, a modest man, a poor man and
a coward. Earle shows how a lack of vigilance in the veriest routine
of life ends in self-deception, error or discontent, and he constantly
draws a comparison between the judgment of wise men and that
passed by the common herd. His technique, roughly, is the same
as that of his predecessors, but his initial definitions are sometimes
more felicitous, and his conclusions sometimes break off with a
studied heedlessness more contemptuous than any invectivel
Hall, Overbury, Stephens and Earle completed the nationalisa-
tion of the Theophrastian character sketch. They were followed
by a host of imitators, of whom John Cleveland, Samuel Butler
and William Law were the greatest; and, from the time of the
Civil War, this type of literature became a recognised weapon
in party strife. Their work is important because it gave direction
and method to the study of character, and introduced a crisp,
concentrated style of description. They cannot be regarded as
having materially influenced the novel, because the Theophrastian
character sketch remained objective, but they supplemented, and,
in some measure, supplanted the drama, which is always hampered
in an age of class satire or political warfare. The beginning of a
more subjective treatment is marked by the publication of The
Wandering Jew (1649). This work is largely a reproduction of
The Man in the Moone, with the important difference that the
characters, besides being described, plead for themselves and thus
enlist our sympathies
The character sketch was mostly an attempt to ventilate the
newly roused interest in morals and manners. But, as we have
seen, its association with conversational preciousness often lowered
it to a mere triumph of paradox. Moreover, it did not fully meet
the needs of the age. As men became conscious of the growing
complexity of London life, they also grew conscious of a running
commentary on similar problems to be found in classical literature.
The humanists of court circles discovered lessons of statecraft and
diplomacy in Machiavelli and Tacitus, examples of daring and
fortitude in Plutarch, and hints for wit and courtesy in Castiglione,
Cicero and Suetonius. Such reading started new trains of thought
1 West's edition of Earle's Microcosmography, 1897, intro. p. xxviii
See bibl.
3 Cf. Raleigh's comparison between Overbury's Country Knight and Sir Roger de
Coverley, History oj' the English Novel, 1891, chap. v.
## p. 343 (#365) ############################################
Origins of the Essay
343
on topics too fleeting and miscellaneous to be classified in a
methodical discourse. But, unsystematised reflection was not
the creation of the Jacobean age. Caxton's prefaces have the
qualifications of essays in criticism. While the form and style
of the medieval Exempla were serving as models for Tudor
jest-books, the apologue tended to expand into a discussion?
The writings of Andrew Boorde and William Bullein are full of
digressions on the occasional interests of daily life, and Nashe's
tracts were practically a patchwork of miscellaneous notes and
observations. The character sketch was far too restricted and
too polemical to gratify this aptitude for desultory comment; but
men of a more contemplative and less satiric frame of mind? began
to jot down their reflections and thoughts, after the manner of
eligious meditations. This habit of thinking on paper rapidly
assumed importance among the intellectual coteries of London;
manuscripts were passed from hand to hand, and the more finished
and methodical commonplace books even found their way into
prints, following the example of Montaigne (1580), from whom they
took the name of 'essay. The new genre entered timidly on its
career, the very title being an apology for its informality and in-
completeness4. The first essayist who anonymously put forth
Remedies against Discontentment drawen into severall discourses
from the writinges of auncient philosophers, in 1596, explains, in
an introductory address, that they were 'onely framed for mine
owne private use; and that is the reason I tooke no great paine,
to set them foorth anye better'; and then, after speaking of the
great moralists of the past, he excuses his own work by adding
From these faire flowers, which their labours have afforded mee, I
have as I passed by, gathered this small heape, and as my time and
leasure served me, distilled them and kept them as precious. ' In
the following year, Bacon produced his slim pamphlet of Essayes.
Religious Meditations. Places of perswasion and disswasion, in
which, among ‘Meditationes sacrae' and 'The Coulers of good and
evill,' we have a number of maxims and directions jotted down
under ten headings, possibly suggested by lord Burghley's Precepts
1 Vide the concluding commentary attached to some of the anecdotes in Mery Tales
and Quicke Answers.
? Cf. the Theophrastians' merciless caricature of the gallant with Cornwallis's
essay on 'Fantasticnesse. '
3 See bibl.
• Essay from low Latin exagium a trial or testing, Italian saggio, Spanish ensayo,
French essai.
## p. 344 (#366) ############################################
344 London and Popular Literature
or Directions for the well ordering and carriage of a man's life'.
Bacon's essays have a narrow but practical scope. They virtually
recognise the courtier's career as a profession, and show how
health, wealth and even learning, must be directed to the develop-
ment of the special qualities necessary for success. Nay, more, his
reflections shed light on the management of men, and penetrate
the cross purposes and conflicting judgments which make up the
atmosphere of the court. This side of human nature was already
familiar to statesmen, but it had never before been discussed in
maxims and rules which, if terse to obscurity, nevertheless reveal
the basis of egoism underlying a maze of intrigues and shifting
reputations.
But the scope and range of the essay had not yet been dis-
covered. Bacon's first series must have appealed to men as a manual
of diplomacy, a kind of Complete Courtier; and, for this reason, Sir
William Cornwallis's work has an importance which its literary
merit would not have justified. He produced in 1600 and 1601
two sets of essays, with some of the diffuseness, but none of
the charm, of Montaigne. He, too, discussed problems of high
life, especially the means by which men rise to prominence or
favour; and, in many places, he gives the same advice as his more
illustrious predecessor. But he has introduced a personal touch
(also a feature of Montaigne) which was afterwards to become
a characteristic of the essay. His reflections are sometimes pre-
faced by curious confidences and self-revelations which give them
the air of a diary. Again, his outlook is wider. The study of
Plutarch's Lives had given him an admiration for manliness, wis-
dom and heroism, and he examines modern character and enter-
prise from this point of view; thus showing how to use the past as
a commentary on the present. And, above all, he formulates the
new ideal? of gentlemanly culture: the man of no special science
but of liberal interests, who can turn all kinds of books, even
nursery rimes and street ballads, to his profit", talk of horses and
See bibl. The Precepts were not printed at this time, but Bacon may well have
seen them in MS.
This conception did not originate with Cornwallis, but is found underlying Lyly's
Euphues and Ascham's definition of evpuns in the Scholemaster, 1570. Vide Elis. Crit.
Essays, vol. 1, p. 1. Perhaps Cornwallis took the idea straight from Montaigne Or à
cet apprentissage (=à bien juger et à bien parler) tout ce qui se presente à nos yeulx sert
de livre suffisant ; la malice d'un page, la sottise d'un valet, un propos de table ce sont
autant de nouvelles matières. ' Institution des Enfants.
3. Of Discourse,' Pt. I.
• Of the Observation and Use of things,' Pt. I.
6
## p. 345 (#367) ############################################
Cornwallis and Robert Johnson 345
>
hawks to those who understand nothing deeper, and use all know-
ledge 'to looke upon man? '
This conception of the honnête homme, formulated thirty years
before Faret's L'Art de plaire à la cour (1630), is the centre of
Robert Johnson's reflections, published as Essaies or Rather Im-
perfect Offers, in 1601. Education is, for him, merely the training
for action; affability3, the art of concealing offence; wisdom*, the
secret of successful statesmanship. His work is more direct and
educative than that of Cornwallis. Frequently, he gives rules for
self-training in special excellence, notably in the essay on ex-
perience", with its examination of the historical lessons to be
learnt from Tacitus. But he never loses sight of the humanist's
ideal of culture. He argues that learning is no inconvenience to
the soldier, but renders him more virtuous; and, while Ascham,
Greene, Nashe and Hall? were anathematising foreign travel,
Johnson advocates it in an essay from which Bacon was not
ashamed to borrow.
The essay was rapidly becoming, instead of an established form
of literature, a collection of notes and maxims. David Tuvill
used it wherein to display amazing familiarity with anecdotes
of Greek and Roman worthies in two garrulously discursive and
unpractical volumes. Before long, the practice of detached com-
position became the object of parody—the surest sign of recogni-
tion—in such productions as The Penniless Parliament of
Threadbare Poets (1608). It blended with the collections of
characters. In the fourth edition of Overbury's works (1614),
a number of witty and humorous essays on countries, manners
and customs were added in the form of Newes. ' John Stephens,
in 1615, coupled his Characters with some verse essays more or
less in the manner of Persius, and some serious prose reflections
full of quaint illustrations of thought, in which he discusses the
claims and responsibilities of high-birth, the need of paternal
kindness, the sin of 'disinheritance' and the lessons of sympathy
and kindness to be learnt from others' sorrow. Geffray Mynshul
'
employed both fashionable types, though both inadequately, to
expose the rapacity of jailors in Essayes and Characters of a
Prison and Prisoners (1618); Nicholas Breton endeavoured to
1
2 E88. III.
3 Ess. X.
+ Ess. IIV.
1 Of knowledge,' Pt. 11.
5 Ess, v.
6
6 Ess. VIII, 'Of Art Military. '
? Quo vadis ? A Just Censure of Travell, 1617.
8 Essaies politicke and morall, by D. T. Gent, 1608; Essayes morall and theologicall,
1609.
. Ante, p. 340.
## p. 346 (#368) ############################################
346
London and Popular Literature
-
fuse the two types into one in Characters upon Essays (1615).
He chose the topics already discussed by the essayists—wisdom,
knowledge, resolution, truth, death, fear-and, in each case, wove
a few commonplace ideas into an embroidery of antithesis and
metaphor. Each essay begins with a conceited definition, which
is elaborated by every artifice of paraphrase, and then relinquished
with an affectation of courtly indifference. Thus, the essay, which
had originated as a record of informal meditation, would probably
have degenerated, for several decades at least, into a mere literary
toy, unless Bacon had shown its true scope and capacity.
Bacon's virtue consists in his style and sagacity, which is all
the more penetrating because confined to a certain range of ideas.
In the edition of 1597, he had refrained from the ornaments of
diction to be found in his earlier works, apparently because the
essays were intended only as private notes for the perusal of a
few friends. But, by 1612, the popularity of the genre and his own
reputation as the inventor induced him to revise the first series
and add twenty-eight new essays in a smoother, less jejune style.
By 1625, his final edition was complete. This collection contains
fifty-eight essays, written with a perfect mastery of language in
a spirit of superb confidence ?
The true importance of his style is to be found in its preg-
nancy. In an age of complicated and superficial verbiage, he
turns the licence of imaginative and allusive expression into
an instrument of accurate and chastened thought. Character
writers had introduced their portraits with a pointed or fanciful
definition. Bacon does the same, but so as to express an abstract
idea in the commonest objects of sight and experience. Thus,
Men in great place are thrice servants,' 'Fortune is like the
market,'Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set,' 'Praise is the
reflection of virtue,' 'He that hath wife and children hath given
hostages to fortune. ' These appeals for confirmation to everyday
facts run all through his essays. Selfish statesmen are compared
to ants in an orchard; men are bettered by believing in a God,
as a dog when he owns a master. Again, though he never con-
descends to convince, his oracular utterances are the fruit of
minute calculation ; and this scientific process appears in the
almost judicial balancing of pros and contras, as in the essay, 'Of
1 'I have read of many essays and a kind of charactering of them, by such, as when
I looked into the form and nature of their writing, I have been of the conceit that they
were but imitators of your breaking the ice to their inventions. ' Nicholas Breton,
dedication to Bacon in Characters upon Essays.
2 Vide S. H. Reynolds, intro. to Essays or Counsels of Francis.
6
a
## p. 347 (#369) ############################################
Bacon
347
Usury,' or in the methodical and detailed directions which he gives,
as in the essay Of Travel. ' His logical habit of mind has trans-
'
formed even the materials of pedantry. The numerous quota-
tions and illustrations drawn from the Bible, the classics and
Machiavelli, seem necessary to his argument, and his unacknow-
ledged appropriations from Montaigne strike one as mere coinci-
dences of thought. All forms of knowledge are subjected to the
elucidation of his views on life. The primum mobile of astronomy
illustrates “the motions of the greatest persons in a government,'
and the legend of Briareus is interpreted as an emblem of the
people's power
These excellencies were largely due to the fact that Bacon
regarded the popularity of the Essays as ephemeral and was
not posing for posterity? He wrote down simply the things which
interested himself. This spontaneity carried its own limitations.
