Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/245

Rh the Vices, Hall is the trenchant satirist who wrote Virgidemiarium, somewhat subdued. He gets his blows home in a style which is vigorous and effective.

In Sir Thomas Overbury's Characters (1614), the type of this particular kind of literature was more definitely fixed than by Hall. Overbury's original Characters were added to by various hands, and they became the model of succeeding attempts. To get a witticism into every sentence was the ambition of the writers, and the result is often very strained. But seventeenth-century wit, if it is often fantastical to and beyond the verge of absurdity, passes readily into poetry. Overbury's Fair and Happy Milkmaid is quite a little pastoral; and in the Microcosmographie (1628) of John Earle (1601?-1665), the friend of Falkland and Clarendon, and Bishop, after the Restoration, of Worcester and of Salisbury, observation, true wit, sense, and feeling are all blended. The tone is infinitely pleasanter than the hard and arrogant satire of Overbury. Their closest parallel in the combination of wit, feeling, and philosophy are the poetic characters, the Zedeprinten (1625) of the Dutch poet Huyghens, who strikes at times, however, a higher note. But Earle's characters are sympathetically studied and