niversity town there would be presented to an observer of his exceptional
penetration enough of the fusion or confusion of classes to furnish the
analytical powers with a tolerably wide field.

And Earle does not suffer by comparison with his rivals. "The concise
narrative manner"[AF] of Theophrastus, though in its way as humorously
informing as we find Plautus and Terence, and as we should have found the
New Comedy which they copied, leaves us a little cold from the looseness
or the connexion in the quasi-narrative: we rise a little unsatisfied from
the ingenious banquet of conversational scraps; we desire more. Overbury,
again, says less than Earle, and is more artificial in saying it. Butler
and Bishop Hall too directly suggest _the essay_[AG] and the sermon. In no
one of them is brevity so obviously the soul of wit as it is in Earle; no
one of them is so humorously thoughtful, so lucid in conception, so
striking in phrase.

When one has reckoned up all these gifts, and all that his friends and
contemporaries said of him, and remember also who and what these friends
were, one is not startled by the eulogistic epitaph in Merton College
Chapel; these words are as moving as they are strong:

Si nomen ejus necdum suboleat, Lector,
Nomen ejus ut pretiosa unguenta;
Johannes Earle Eboracensis.

But his own choicer Latin in the epitaph he wrote for the learned Peter
Heylin would serve no less well for himself; and the beautiful brevity of
its closing cadences has so much of the distinction of his English, and
puts so forcibly what Earle deserves to have said of him, that it may
fitly be the last word here:

Plura ejusmodi meditanti
mors indixit silentium:
ut sileatur
efficere non potest.

S.T.I.

Clifton, May, 1896.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] It came out in 1811. Forty-four years afterwards he wrote that in his
interleaved copy the list of Seventeenth Century Characters had increased
fourfold--good evidence of his affection for and interest in Earle's
Characters. Yet he despaired of anyone republishing a book so "common and
unimportant" (??). (See Arber's reprint of Earle.) It is to the credit of
Bristol that this pessimism has not been justified.

[B] Since writing this preface I have added a small supplementary
appendix; but there is nothing in it to require much qualification of the
opinion here expressed. It was har