Microcosmography. Earle John
informing as we find Plautus and Terence, and as we should have found the New Comedy which they copied, leaves us a little cold from the looseness or the connexion in the quasi-narrative: we rise a little unsatisfied from the ingenious banquet of conversational scraps; we desire more. Overbury, again, says less than Earle, and is more artificial in saying it. Butler and Bishop Hall too directly suggest the essay[AG] and the sermon. In no one of them is brevity so obviously the soul of wit as it is in Earle; no one of them is so humorously thoughtful, so lucid in conception, so striking in phrase.
When one has reckoned up all these gifts, and all that his friends and contemporaries said of him, and remember also who and what these friends were, one is not startled by the eulogistic epitaph in Merton College Chapel; these words are as moving as they are strong:
But his own choicer Latin in the epitaph he wrote for the learned Peter Heylin would serve no less well for himself; and the beautiful brevity of its closing cadences has so much of the distinction of his English, and puts so forcibly what Earle deserves to have said of him, that it may fitly be the last word here:
Clifton, May, 1896.
[A] It came out in 1811. Forty-four years afterwards he wrote that in his interleaved copy the list of Seventeenth Century Characters had increased fourfold – good evidence of his affection for and interest in Earle's Characters. Yet he despaired of anyone republishing a book so "common and unimportant" (??). (See Arber's reprint of Earle.) It is to the credit of Bristol that this pessimism has not been justified.
[B] Since writing this preface I have added a small supplementary appendix; but there is nothing in it to require much qualification of the opinion here expressed. It was hardly possible, as I gather, for Bliss to have known of the Durham MS.
[C] Mr. John Morley has called Pattison's standard "the highest of our time." Bliss's conception of an editor's duties is well illustrated in the note on p. 73.
[D] "Varium ac multiplicem expetens cultum deus." —Mori Utopia Lib. II.
[E] Vol. iii., pp. 153 and 154.
[F] Were the unorthodox opinions of Hobbes known to his friends as early as 1647? If so, Earle could hardly have been very curious in scenting out heresy, for Clarendon hopes Earle's intercession may secure for him a book of Hobbes's. (See letters of Clarendon in Supplementary Appendix.)
[G] Professor Jebb, in his edition of The Characters of Theophrastus. I rejoice to see that Professor Jebb assigns Earle a place of far more distinction than is implied in the measured tribute of Hallam. His preface furnishes lovers of Earle with just those reasoned opinions with which instinctive attraction desires to justify itself; and I take this opportunity of acknowledging my great obligations to it.
[H] Hallam. The same tone is taken in the article on Earle in the "Encyclopædia Britannica."
[I] Mr. Bridges indeed, ("Achilles in Scyros"), finds that this character has been always with us, and gives it a place in the Heroic Age. The passage has almost the note of Troilus and Cressida: —
"My invitation, Sir,
Was but my seal of full denial, a challenge
For honor's eye not to be taken up.
Your master hath slipped in manners."
[J] We may compare Matthew Arnold's travelling companion ("Essays in Criticism," 1st Edition, Preface), who was so nervous about railway murders, and who refused to be consoled by being reminded that though the worst should happen, there would still be the old crush at the corner of Fenchurch Street, and that he would not be missed: "the great mundane movement would still go on!"
[K] Chaucer could hardly have been well-known in 1811, or Dr. Bliss would scarcely have quoted in full the most familiar character in his Prologue; but I could not find courage to excise, or lay a profane hand on any of his notes.
[L] It is, perhaps, superfluous to say that no disrespect is intended to the Author of the "Ring and the Book"; but it would be difficult to find another poet who has had so many of the equivocal tributes of fashion.
[M] Sir Thomas Browne, "Christian Morals."
[N] "So infinite a fancy, bound in by a most logical ratiocination." —Clarendon (of Lord Falkland).
[O] Clarendon.
[P] "A great cherisher of good parts … and if he found men clouded with poverty, or want, a most liberal and bountiful patron." —Clarendon, ib.
[Q] Clarendon, ib.
[R] Between Earle himself and Berkeley there is much resemblance. Of Berkeley too it would have been said – "a person certainly of the sweetest and most obliging nature that lived in our age"; and this resemblance extends beyond their social gifts or their cast of mind, even to their language. Earle's "vulgar-spirited" man, with whom "to thrive is to do well," recalls a famous passage in the Siris.
"He that hath not thought much about God, the human soul, and the summum bonum, may indeed be a thriving earth-worm, but he will make a sorry patriot, and a sorry statesman."
[S] Is this from Pliny's Letters? "Totum patrem mira similitudine exscripserat." —Lib. V. xvi.
[T] One may recall, too, the famous words of the Sophoclean Ajax to his son in connection with Earle's phrases. "He is not come to his task of melancholy," "he arrives not at the mischief of being wise," read like a free translation of Soph. Ajax, II. 554 and 555.
[U] Perhaps the simile in Æn. viii. 408 and one or two other places would justify us in calling this also Virgilian, as, indeed, one may call most good things.
[V] Clarendon – his character of Lord Falkland.
[W] There are certain things not at all sombre applicable not only to our day, but to our hour, e. g. "the poet (I regret to say he is 'a pot poet,') now much employed in commendations of our navy"; or this, "His father sent him to the University, because he heard there were the best fencing and dancing schools there." If we substitute athletics of some kind, we have a very modern reason for the existence of such things as Universities accepted as sound by both parents and children. cf. too Dr. Bliss's note on the serving-man, and its quotation, "An' a man have not skill in the hawking and hunting languages nowadays, I'll not give a rush for him!"
[X] cf. Falconbridge in "King John":
"And if his name be George I'll call him Peter,
For new-made honour doth forget men's names."
It is this character which was the occasion of the most delightful of all stories of absence of mind, and though, doubtless, familiar to many, I cannot resist repeating it. The poet Rogers was looking at a new picture in the National Gallery in company with a friend. Rogers was soon satisfied, but his friend was still absorbed. "I say," said Rogers, "that fellow [Earle's insolent man] was