Microcosmography. Earle John

      Microcosmography / or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters

      "From the contagion of the world's slow stain

      He was secure."

      PREFACE

It may be reasonably asked why Dr. Bliss's[A] edition of the Microcosmography should require a preface, and the answer is that it does not require one. It would be difficult to have a more scholarly, more adequate, more self-sufficing edition of a favourite book. Almost everything that helps the elucidation of the text, almost everything about Bishop Earle that could heighten our affection for him (there is nothing known to his disparagement) is to be found here.[B] And affection for the editor is conciliated by the way. It is not only his standard of equipment that secures this – a standard that might have satisfied Mark Pattison[C]– but also the painstaking love revealed in it, which, like every other true love, whether of men or books, will not give of that which costs it nothing. And, as a further title to our regard, Dr. Bliss is amusing at his own expense, and compares himself to Earle's "critic," who swells books into folios with his comments. Not that this humorous self-depreciation is to be pressed; for, unlike that critic, he is no "troublesome vexer of the dead."

      But though there is no need of a preface, I have two excuses for writing one.

The first is that I was asked to do it by my friend Mr. Frank George, of Bristol, who wished to see the book reprinted; and the second is the old professio pietatis, which seemed to Tacitus a sufficient defence of the Agricola, and may perhaps be allowed to serve humbler people as well. What Earle says of men is no less true of books: "Acquaintance is the first draught of a friend. Men take a degree in our respect till at last they wholly possess us;" and the history of this possession must, in every case, have a sort of interest, as long as it is not carried to the point of demanding from others the superlatives we permit to ourselves. It is sufficiently common for people to like the same book for different reasons; and where an author has a secure place in English literature, his shade, like the deity of Utopia, may be best pleased with a manifold and various worship.[D]

      The character of Earle, as drawn by Clarendon, is itself a guarantee for his studies of character; and the fact that Lord Falkland was his chosen friend is evidence of his possessing something of that sweet reasonableness of temper for which his host was so remarkable. "He was very dear" (we are told) "to the Lord Falkland, with whom he spent as much time as he could make his own." Indeed, "Mr. Earles would frequently profess that he had got more useful learning by his conversation at Tew than he had at Oxford." Of Earle's conversation Clarendon says that it was "so pleasant and delightful, so very innocent and so very facetious, that no man's company was more desired and more loved." Walton, too, tells us of his "innocent wisdom and sanctified learning"; and another witness speaks of his "charitable heart," an epithet which is nobly borne out by the correspondence between himself and Baxter printed in this volume.

This is no superfluous citation of testimony. Without it we might, perhaps, have suspected, though not, I think, legitimately, something almost of a cynical spirit in the severity of the punishment which he deals out to the various disguises of vice and imposture, and in the pitiless nakedness in which he leaves them. But there are even stronger reasons for recalling contemporary verdicts pronounced on Earle as a man. Hallam, in the "Literature of Europe,"[E] has a short notice of him, and though it shews some appreciation of his ability, it contains a very unworthy aspersion on his character. "The chapter on the sceptic," he says, "is witty, but an insult to the honest searcher after truth, which could only have come from one that was content to take up his own opinions for ease or profit." If we accept all that is said of Earle's piety and devotion, and give its proper weight to the very significant epithet "innocent," used both by Walton and Clarendon, we shall, I think, be slow to suspect his motive in attacking the sceptic. The honest doubter, it must be remembered, was not the familiar – much less the fashionable – figure he has become since, and it is very certain that Earle described one type of sceptic both of his day and our own. That his sketch may have done injustice to other types is likely enough; but that is no reason for calling in question the sincerity of his opinions, or attributing an interested orthodoxy to one whom Bunyan might have christened Mr. Singleheart. The piety of the 17th Century was not disposed to be gentle to sceptics. Even Bacon's enlightenment allows itself harsher language on such subjects than any to be found in Earle. "None do refuse to believe in a God save those for whom it maketh that there were no God." And if Bacon is not thought a satisfactory witness, we have an unimpeachable one very much nearer to our time. Dr. Johnson's occasional strictures on sceptics are well-known, but his reputation for honest thinking has never been impaired by their severity. Earle knew what charity was, as the Baxter correspondence shows, and he has exposed in one of his characters "the faith that has no room for it"; and if his own faith needed further enlargement in the case of a sceptic,[F] some enlargement of Hallam's charity might also have been looked for in dealing with the earnestness of a militant piety.

The character-sketch is naturally a thing of limited scope. "Fine portraiture,"[G] it has been said, "is not possible under such conditions as it imposes. The traits, common to a class, cannot at the same time be the accurate and intimate likeness of an individual. For this, a simple enumeration of actions which such and such a man will do, is not enough. A novelist takes a long series of connected actions, and even then he has to interpret, to review from time to time whole stages of development." All this is, no doubt, true, but the character-writers differ to a remarkable extent in their individualising power – some of them achieving a high degree of success, as is subsequently admitted in the case of Thackeray by the writer just quoted. It may be noticed too, by the way, that great novelists are not always equally successful in the character-sketch. One is reminded of Johnson's phrase about Milton's inability "to carve heads upon cherry stones" when one thinks of "Theophrastus Such" on the one hand, and the almost unique position of George Eliot as a novelist on the other. Less successful as she often is in lightness of touch when she has to pause and interpret her story, she had not prepared us for such a complete exhaustion of power as her attempt in this branch of literature (apparently of the same genus, almost of the same species, as the novel) reveals to her disappointed admirers. It may, at any rate, be said that her failure is an instructive lesson in the literary division of labour, and that these studies require a peculiar delicacy of organisation in the observer, as well as a special gift of exposition.

      "Dolus latet in generalibus" is a salutary warning, but the character-writers, as a whole, have in most instances got creditably out of the snare, while Earle, I think, has achieved something more. Besides his humour and acuteness, besides even his profundity, I find in him an exceptional power of individualizing. "The contemplative man," for instance, belongs to a small class at all times; but it is only an individual we have known, and known at rare intervals, of whose Wordsworthian temper we are able to say that "Nature asks his approbation as it were of her works and variety." Again, "the grave divine, who is not yet dean or canon, though his life is our religion's best apology," reads throughout like a personal experience. I at least so read it, or I should not have borrowed from Earle for the dedication which stands at the head of this preface. Yet such identifications are usually reserved for the great novelist, whose highest art, as Macaulay says, is to "make the inventions of one man seem like the recollections of another."

Some of Earle's readers appear to be chiefly impressed with his book as furnishing "a picturesque idea of a period now remote, and as possessing much of the affected quaintness of its age."[H] The picturesqueness I find, and a good deal of quaintness; but the total impression is that of a man who has got beyond words, ancient or modern, in his studies of human nature – of one who, whether