g closer if we wished. And yet if we do not
care to reason a type out, there are pictures enough unspoilt by
commentary.[AB] Earle has some of that delightful suddenness of
illustration which Selden makes so captivating in his Table-Talk. At once
we are made to see likeness or unlikeness, we hear no comment on it; since
the artist desires no more moral than is to be looked for in his art.

When on the other hand Earle makes more of the reason of the thing, he[AC]
is literally "swift and sententious"--he never takes the opportunity to
draw us into an instructive disquisition, or to assume airs of profundity.
And his passing hint as to the cause of what _we see_ no more injures any
picture he may draw than Coleridge's prose argument at the side of the
page destroys the imaginative spectacle in the Ancient Mariner.

Earle, it has been said, "is not so thoroughly at home with men of all
sorts and conditions as Overbury, who had probably seen far more of the
world."[AD] However relatively true this may be, Earle's book [published
1628] gives evidence of an experience of men as wide as it is intimate--an
experience little short of marvellous in a resident Fellow of
twenty-seven, whose younger years were chiefly distinguished for "oratory,
poetry, and witty fancies."[AE] (Perhaps his youth may account for some of
that excessive severity in handling follies which is occasionally
noticeable.) The article in the "Dictionary of National Biography" gives a
somewhat different impression of Earle as an observer. "The sketches
throw," it says, "_the greatest light_ upon the social condition of the
time." Now this is not possible for anyone to achieve whose vision
requires "the spectacles of books"; though with such help it is doubtless
possible to extend and improve on the observations of others, with human
nature as a constant quantity. But to be at home with one's contemporaries
and to record one's intimacy means to see with the eye as well as the
mind. The slow inductive method of personal contact is indispensable; and
no reasoning from first principles, no assimilating of secondhand
experience, with whatever touches of genius, can be mistaken for it.

It is not likely that the Registrar's house (his father's house) at York
added much to Earle's sketch-book; and we have to fall back on what
Clarendon says of his delightful conversation, and by implication, of his
delight in it. In the society of a University and in the life of a
U