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,[FB] 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.[FC] 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.