"Biographia Dramatica:"--"This author, with singular
abilities, was neither happy or successful. Few persons were
ever less respected by the world; still fewer have created so
many enemies, or dropped into the grave so little regretted by
their contemporaries. He was seldom without an enemy to attack
or defend himself from." He was the son of a London citizen,
and is said to have served an apprenticeship to a brass-rule
maker. One of his best known literary works was a comedy
called _Falstaff's Wedding_, which met with considerable
success upon the stage, although its author ventured on the
difficult task of adopting Shakespeare's characters, and
putting new words into the mouth of the immortal Sir John and
his satellites.--ED.

A VOLUMINOUS AUTHOR WITHOUT JUDGMENT.

Vast erudition, without the tact of good sense, in a voluminous
author, what a calamity! for to such a mind no subject can present
itself on which he is unprepared to write, and none at the same time
on which he can ever write reasonably. The name and the works of
WILLIAM PRYNNE have often come under the eye of the reader; but it is
even now difficult to discover his real character; for Prynne stood so
completely insulated amid all parties, that he was ridiculed by his
friends, and execrated by his enemies. The exuberance of his fertile
pen, the strangeness and the manner of his subjects, and his
pertinacity in voluminous publication, are known, and are nearly
unparalleled in literary history.

Could the man himself be separated from the author, Prynne would not
appear ridiculous; but the unlucky author of nearly two hundred
works,[102] and who, as Wood quaintly computes, "must have written a
sheet every day of his life, reckoning from the time that he came to
the use of reason and the state of man," has involved his life in his
authorship; the greatness of his character loses itself in his
voluminous works; and whatever Prynne may have been in his own age,
and remains to posterity, he was fated to endure all the calamities of
an author who has strained learning into absurdity, and abused zealous
industry by chimerical speculation.

Yet his activity, and the firmness and intrepidity of his character
in public life, were as ardent as they were in his study--his soul
was Roman; and Eachard says, that Charles II., who could not but
admire his earnes