Part 82

14. The captive Captain, or the restrained Cavalier," 1665, also, in part, suggests Earle. "Of a Prison," "The anatomy of a Jayler," "The lean Prisoner," "The restrained Cavalier and his melancholy."

15. Bliss also mentions "The character of a learned man," and gives some choice extracts. "Our sottish and idle enthusiasts are to be reproved who call learning but a splendidum peccatum." "Alexander commanded his soldiers neither to damnify Pindarus, the poet, nor any of his family."

16. "A wandering Jew telling fortunes to Englishmen." 1640.

17. "The spiritual navigators bound for the Holy Land." 1615.

18. "The picture of a modern Whig: a dialogue between Whiglove and Double, at Tom's Coffee-House." 1715.

19. In 1671 "Le vice ridicule" appeared. A sort of translation of Earle's characters.

20. Pictures of Passions, Fancies, and Affections, poetically deciphered in variety of characters (no date).

21. Characters of gentlemen that have put in to the Ladies Invention. This begins--"A little Beau of the city strain."

22. Characters of several ingenious designing gentlewomen, who have lately put in to the Ladies Invention, which is intended to be drawn as soon as full. (There is no date to either of these.)

One or two extracts may be added from Anthony Wood.

"Lord Falkland, when he became one of the gentlemen of His Majesty's Privy Chamber, had frequent retirements to Great Tew and sometimes to Oxon, for the company of and conversation with learned and witty men. William Chillingworth (author of the Religion of Protestants), Joh. Earle, Charles Gataker (son of Thomas Gataker [the Editor of Marcus Aurelius] and Anthony Wood thinks Chaplain to Lord Falkland); Thomas Triplet, a very witty man of Christ Church; Hugh Cressey, and others. Cressey wrote a number of theological works, and in one of them occurs the testimony to Earle given in Bliss."

The saturnine Anthony Wood is amusingly illustrated in two passages from his notice of Earle. "John Earle received his first being in this vain and transitory world within the city of York.... His elegy on Beaumont was printed at the end of the quarto edition of Beaumont's poems--put out with a poetical epistle before them, subscribed by a Presbyterian bookbinder--afterwards an informer to the Court of Sequestration ... and a beggar defunct in prison"! In the notice of Morley he tells us that "his banishment was made less tedious to him by the company of Dr. Joh. Earle, his dearest friend." It is sad to find that the translation of Hooker which was "to make the learned of all nations happy" was "utterly destroyed"--the loose papers being taken by the servants after Earle's death "to light their fires or else to put under their bread and pies." This translation "was Earle's entertainment during a part of his exile at Cologne." See the Bodleian letters quoted in Arber's Reprint. To that Reprint I have been much indebted for help of various kinds.

My warmest thanks are due to Professor Rowley, of University College, Bristol, whom I have constantly consulted while preparing this issue of Dr. Bliss's edition. If one may be allowed a slight twist of a Shakspearian phrase, I would say of such help as his--"Ripeness is all." It is this quality that makes one at least of Professor Rowley's friends so grateful and so importunate.

S. T. I. Clifton, April, 1897.

FOOTNOTES:

In a later hand.

Arcana in margin.

Th. in margin, i.e., Th.

In a later hand.

In the later hand.

A fellow of Merton with Earle. His testimony to Earle is quoted by Bliss. Anthony Wood says of him, "that when he lost his most beloved Lord Falkland, at Newbury Fight, he travelled as a tutor, and upon a freight that the Church of England would terminate through the endeavours of the peevish and restless Presbyterians, began to think of settling himself in the Church of Rome." He recanted his errors publicly at Rome in 1646.

Poetical?

This epithet with Clarendon's "wary and cultivated" must be set against what Clarendon tells us of his "negligence in dress, habit and mien." Earle can never have been awkward. His courtesy was born with him, and he can never have needed (like "the downright scholar") "brushing over with good company."

Memoirs, vol. I, p. 81, ed. C. Firth.

I ought to say that Mr. Madan, who was kind enough to look at my copy, does not think many of the notes are in Bliss's hand-writing.

"More care, attention, accuracy and valuable enlargement from an inexhaustible stock of materials has rarely been witnessed than in the editorial labours of Dr. Bliss."--Dibdin, speaking of Bliss's edition of the Athenæ Oxonienses.

Cowper's Letters, June 12th, 1782.

Some of the MS. notes in my copy are the same as those in the printed volume.