_Is the next of our Character writers. His "Microcosmography, or a Piece
of the World discovered, in Essays and Characters" was first printed in
1628. John Earle was born in the city of York, at the beginning of the
seventeenth century, probably in the year 1601. His father, who was
Registrar of the Archbishop's Court, sent him to Oxford in 1619, and he
was said to be eighteen years old when he matriculated, that year, as a
commoner at Christchurch. He graduated as Master of Arts in 1624. He was
a Fellow of Merton, and wrote in his younger days several occasional
poems that won credit before he published anonymously, still as an
Oxford man, when he was about twenty-seven years old, his famous
Characters. But he remembered York when adding to their title that they
were "newly composed for the northern part of this Kingdom." This first
edition contained fifty-four characters, which precede the others in the
following collection. In the next year, 1629, the book reached a fifth
edition, printed for Robert Allot, in which the number of the characters
was increased to seventy-six. Two more characters--a Herald, and a
Suspicious or Jealous Man--were added in the sixth edition, which was
printed for Allot in 1633. The seventh edition was printed for Andrew
Coolie in 1638, the eighth in 1650. Other editions followed in 1669,
1676, 1732, and at Salisbury in 1786. In 1811 the little book was edited
carefully by Dr. Philip Bliss, and it was edited again by Professor
Edward Arber in 1868, in his valuable series of English Reprints.
John Earle, after the production of his "Microcosmography," wrote in
April 1630 a short poem upon the death of William, third Earl of
Pembroke, son of Sidney's sister. The third Earl's younger brother
Philip succeeded as fourth Earl, and was Chancellor of the University of
Oxford. He was then, or thereafter became, Earle's patron, and made him
his chaplain. About the same time, in 1631, Earle acted as proctor of
the University. In 1639 the Earl of Pembroke presented John Earle to the
living of Bishopston in Wiltshire, as successor to Chillingworth.
Pembroke being Lord Chamberlain was entitled also to a residence at
Court for his chaplain, and thus Earle was brought under the immediate
notice of Charles I., who appointed him to be his own chaplain, and made
him tutor to Prince Charles in 1641, when Dr. Brian Duppa, the preceding
tutor, had been made Bishop of Salisbury. In 1642 Earle proceeded to the
degree of D.D. In 1643 he was elected Chancellor of the Cathedral at
Salisbury, but he was presently deprived by the Parliament of that
office, and of his living at Bishopston. He then lived in retirement
abroad, made a translation into Latin of Hooker's "Ecclesiastical
Polity" which his servants negligently used, after his death, as waste
paper, and of the "Eikon Basilike" which was published in 1649. After
the Restoration, Dr. Earle was made Dean of Westminster; then, in 1662,
Bishop of Worcester. He was translated to Salisbury in 1663, died in
November 1665, and was buried near the altar in Merton College Church.
Earle was a man so gentle and liberal, that while Clarendon described
him as "among the few excellent men who never had and never could have
an enemy," Baxter wrote in the margin of a kindly letter from him, "O,
that they were all such!" and Calamy described him as "a man that could
do good against evil, forgive much out of a charitable heart." The
Parliament, even just before depriving him as a malignant, had put him
to the trouble of declining its nomination as one of the Westminster
Assembly of Divines. As a Bishop in the early days of Charles the Second
he did all he could to oppose the persecuting spirit of the first
Conventicle Act and of the Five Mile Act.
Dr. Philip Bliss, who died in 1857, after a life marked by many services
to English Literature, chose Bishop Earle's "Characters" for one of his
earlier studies, published in 1811, when his own age was twenty-four.
His book[2] included an account of Bishop Earle himself, a list of his
writings, publication for the first time of some of his early verses,
his correspondence with Baxter, and a Chronological List of Books of
Characters from 1567 to 1700, which was the first contribution to a
study of this feature in our Seventeenth Century Literature. Bliss took
his text of Earle from the edition of 1732, collated with the first
impression in 1628. As the Characters which now follow are given with
Bliss's text and notes, I add what the editor himself says of his
method. The variations of the 1732 text from the first impressions in
1628 are thus distinguished: "Those words or passages which have been
added since the first edition are contained between brackets_ [and
printed in the common type]; _those which have received some alteration
are printed in italic; and the passages, as they stand in the first
edition, are always given in a note."_