Earle's Microcosmography[1] and Overbury's Characters. It was individualism within the circle of the "Grand Monarch's" court that produced at once the Caractères of La Bruyère and the comedies of Molière.
Bringing out his first comedy in the very year of Demosthenes' death (322 B.C.), Menander, the model of Terence, is a literary man who may be said to occupy the unique position of a link at once between Athens and Alexandria, and between Athens and Rome. The drama, like the written dialogue of criticism and the written speech, had now become an instrument of the literary artist rather than a public voice addressing itself to the people; and the enormous number of comedies attributed to the later comedians, contrasted with the small number of their victories, has been regarded as an evidence of their plays having been intended to be read, and fulfilling to some extent the functions of the critical press in our days. Thus the severance of literature from practical life—a severance in which some modern critics have discovered a kind of literary Arcadia—was everywhere accompanying the decadence of the creative spirit. We need not here
- ↑ "Microcosmographie, or a peece of the world discovered; in essays and characters. London. Printed by William Stansby for Edward Blount, 1628." In the introduction to Mr. Arber's reprint of this book, it is observed that "in these earlier days of Puritanism especially, and generally throughout the seventeenth century, there was a strong passion for analysis of human character. Men delighted in introspection. Essays and characters took the place of the romances of the former century. Dr. Bliss, to an edition of Microcosmographie in 1811, added a list of fifty-seven books of characters, all, with one exception, published between 1605 and 1700. Forty-four years later, writing in 1855 to Notes and Queries, he stated that this list in his own interleaved copy had increased four-fold." So popular was Microcosmographie that five editions appear to have been published in the first two years of publication. It is worth adding that the character of the "upstart country knight" (like that of Sir Giles Overreach in Massinger's play) marks the changes in landownership which the prosperity of the commercial classes was bringing about. In other characters of Earle we may similarly discern the social conditions of his day.
