Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/244

224 as Taylor's, it has at its best a larger compass, and in none is the poet's fine ear for musical combinations of consonants and vowels so obvious. Rich in prose poetry as English literature is, it has nothing that in sustained elevation of thought and splendour of phrase surpasses Areopagitica.

A form of prose literature which touches the sermon literature of the seventeenth century on the one hand and its comedy on the other is the character sketches suggested by the Characters of Theophrastus. Bishop Hall, the trenchant Anglican preacher and controversialist, who, like Donne, had begun his career as a satirist, was one of the earliest in the field with his Characters of Virtues and Vices (1608),—the "penurious book of characters" to which Milton refers contemptuously,—avowedly modelled on the Greek. They are written with the vigour and point, if also with the want of any high distinction, which belong to Hall's work in general. The virtues especially suffer from the abstract handling, which is the weakness of the Characters generally. It is only occasionally that they are enlivened by concrete detail or happy image, as when he says of the Good Magistrate, in a figure that recalls Bacon, "Displeasure, Revenge, Recompense stand on both sides the bench, but he scorns to turn his eye towards them, looking only right forward at Equity, which stands full before him." In treating of