He conceals his best
skill, not so as it may not be known that he knows it, but so as it may
not be learned, because he would have the world miss him. He attained to
a foreign medicine by the secret legacy of a dying empiric, whereof he
will leave no heir lest the praise shall be divided. Finally, he is an
enemy to God's favours, if they fall beside himself; the best nurse of
ill-fame, a man of the worst diet, for he consumes himself, and delights
in pining; a thorn-hedge covered with nettles, a peevish interpreter of
good things, and no other than a lean and pale carcase quickened with
a fiend.

* * * * *

JOHN STEPHENS,

_The younger, a lawyer of Lincoln's Inn, published in 1615 "Satyrical
Essayes, Characters, and others, or accurate and quick Descriptions
fitted to the life of their Subjects." He had published two years before
a play called "Cinthia's Revenge, or Maenander's Extasie," which
Langbaine described as one of the longest he had ever read, and the most
tedious. Somebody seems to have attacked him and his Characters. A
second edition, in 1631, was entitled "New Essays and Characters, with a
new Satyre in defence of the Common Law, and Lawyers: mixt with Reproofe
against their enemy Ignoramus."_

JOHN EARLE

_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 editio