Earle’s Characters. 39. John Earle, after the Restoration bishop of Worcester, and then of Salisbury, is author of “Microcosmographia, or a Piece of the Worlde discovered in Essays and Characters,” published anonymously in 1628. In some of these short characters, Earle is worthy of comparison with La Bruyère; in others, perhaps the greater part, he has contented himself with pictures of ordinary manners, such as the varieties of occupation, rather than of intrinsic character, supply. In all, however, we find an acute observation and a happy humour of expression. The chapter entitled the Sceptic is best known; it is witty, but an insult throughout on the honest searcher after truth, which could have come only from one that was content to take up his own opinions for ease or profit. Earle is always gay and quick to catch the ridiculous, especially that of exterior appearances; his style is short, describing well with a few words, but with much of the affected quaintness of that age. It is one of those books which give us a picturesque idea of the manners of our fathers at a period now become remote, and for this reason it would deserve to be read.
Overbury’s Characters. 40. But the Microcosmography is not an original work in its plan or mode of execution; it is a close imitation of the Characters of Sir Thomas Overbury. They both belong to the favourite style of apophthegm, in which every sentence is a point or a witticism. Yet the entire character so delineated produces a certain effect; it is a Dutch picture, a Gerard Dow, somewhat too elaborate. Earle has more natural humour than Overbury, and hits his mark more neatly; the other is more satirical, but often abusive and vulgar. The “Fair and Happy Milk-maid,” often quoted, is the best of his characters. The wit is often trivial and flat; the sentiments have nothing in them general, or worthy of much resemblance; praise is only due to the graphic skill in delineating character. Earle is as clearly the better, as Overbury is the more original, writer.
Jonson’s Discoveries. 41. A book by Ben Jonson, entitled “Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter,” is altogether miscellaneous, the greater part being general moral remarks, while another portion deserves notice as the only book of English criticism in the first part of the seventeenth century. The observations are unconnected, judicious, sometimes witty, frequently severe. The style is what was called pregnant, leaving much to be filled up by the reader’s reflection. Good sense and a vigorous manner of grappling with every subject will generally be found in Jonson, but he does not reach any very profound criticism. His English Grammar is said by Gifford to have been destroyed in the conflagration of his study. What we have, therefore, under that name is, he thinks, to be considered as properly the materials of a more complete work that is lost. We have, as I apprehend, no earlier grammar upon so elaborate a plan; every rule is illustrated by examples, almost to redundance; but he is too copious on what is common to other languages, and perhaps not full enough as to our peculiar idiom. Nothing else deserving of the slightest notice can be added to this book of Jonson.
Sect. II.
ON FICTION.
Cervantes—French Romances—Calprenède—Scuderi—Latin and English Works of Fiction.
Publication of Don Quixote. 42. The first part of Don Quixote was published in 1605. We have no reason, I believe, to suppose that it was written long before. It became immediately popular; and the admiration of the world raised up envious competitors, one of whom, Avellenada, published a continuation in a strain of invective against the author. Cervantes, who cannot be imagined to have ever designed the leaving his romance in so unfinished a state, took time about the second part, which did not appear till 1615.
Its reputation. 43. Don Quixote is the only book in the Spanish language which can now be said to possess much of an European reputation. It has, however, enjoyed enough to compensate for the neglect of all the rest. It is to Europe in general what Ariosto is to Italy, and Shakspeare to England; the one book to which the slightest allusions may be made without affectation, but not missed without discredit. Numerous translations and countless editions of them, in every language, bespeak its adaptation to mankind; no critic has been paradoxical enough to withhold his admiration, no reader has ventured to confess a want of relish for that in which the young and old, in every climate, have, age after age, taken delight. They have doubtless believed that they understood the author’s meaning; and, in giving the reins to the gaiety that his fertile invention and comic humour inspired, never thought of any deeper meaning than he announces, or delayed their enjoyment for any metaphysical investigation of his plan.
New views of its design. 44. A new school of criticism, however, has of late years arisen in Germany, acute, ingenious, and sometimes eminently successful in philosophical, or, as they denominate it, æsthetic analysis of works of taste, but gliding too much into refinement and conjectural hypothesis, and with a tendency to mislead men of inferior capacities for this kind of investigation into mere paradox and absurdity. An instance is supplied, in my opinion, by some remarks of Bouterwek, still more explicitly developed by Sismondi, on the design of Cervantes in Don Quixote, and which have been repeated in other publications. According to these writers, the primary idea is that of a “man of elevated character, excited by heroic and enthusiastic feelings to the extravagant pitch of wishing to restore the age of chivalry; nor is it possible to form a more mistaken notion of this work than by considering it merely as a satire, intended by the author to ridicule the absurd passion for reading old romances.”[587] “The fundamental idea of Don Quixote,” says Sismondi, “is the eternal contrast between the spirit of poetry and that of prose. Men of an elevated soul propose to themselves as the object of life to be the defenders of the weak, the support of the oppressed, the champions of justice and innocence. Like Don Quixote, they find on every side the image of the virtues they worship; they believe that disinterestedness, nobleness, courage, in short, knight errantry, are still prevalent; and with no calculation of their own powers, they expose themselves for an ungrateful world, they offer themselves as a sacrifice to the laws and rules of an imaginary state of society.”[588]
[587] Bouterwek, p. 334.