ng "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

"invectively he pierceth through
The body of the country, city, court;"

or is "anatomizing the wise man's folly," is as instructive a moralist in
the end of the nineteenth century as in the beginning of the seventeenth.
This, in a sense, is true of all great moralists, but the distinction of
Earle, as I understand it, is that his characters are so often really
people of our own day, with idiosyncracies that seem almost more
applicable to our own age than to his.

Society is almost a technical term to-day, susceptible, one would have
said, of refinements of difference infinitely more various than anything
that could have existed more than two hundred years ago; yet one cannot
but feel that this observer would have been fully equal to drawing our
microcosm as well as his own. Earle's is a penetrating observation which
is always fresh--so fresh that no archaism of phrase in him, and no cheery
optimism in ourselves, can disguise the fact that it is our weaknesses he
is probing, our motives he is discovering.

There are still with us "those well-behaved ghosts AEneas met with--friends
to talk with, and men to look on, but if he grasped them but air"--those
shadowy creatures that "wonder at your ill-breeding,[I] that cannot
distinguish between what is spoken and what is meant."

We are no strangers to "the fashionable respect which loves not deeper
mutualities, but though exceeding kind and friendly at your first
acquaintance, is at the twentieth meeting but friendly still"; or to that
similar temper which "nothing so much puts out as to trespass against the
genteel way." And, to go a stage lower, the formal man still survives,
whose "face is in so good a frame because he is not disjointed with other
meditations--who hath staid in the world to fill a number; and when he is
gone there wants one and there's an end."[J] He, to be sure, has no
conversation, and that is his discretion--but others display then as now a
bolder discretion, and in their talk "fly for sanctuary rather to nonsense
which few descry, than to nothing which all."

But literary conversation is not forgotten. It may be a stretch be