BY JOSEPH HALL.
A PREMONITION or THE TITLE AND USE OF CHARACTERS.
Reader,--The divines of the old heathens were their moral philosophers. These received the acts of an inbred law, in the Sinai of nature, and delivered them with many expositions to the multitude. These were the overseers of manners, correctors of vices, directors of lives, doctors of virtue, which yet taught their people the body of their natural divinity, not after one manner: while some spent themselves in deep discourses of human felicity and the way to it in common, others thought it best to apply the general precepts of goodness or decency to particular conditions and persons. A third sort in a mean course betwixt the two other, and compounded of them both, bestowed their time in drawing out the true lineaments of every virtue and vice, so lively, that who saw the medals might know the face; which art they significantly termed Charactery. Their papers were so many tables, their writings so many speaking pictures, or living images, whereby the ruder multitude might even by their sense learn to know virtue and discern what to detest. I am deceived if any course could be more likely to prevail, for herein the gross conceit is led on with pleasure, and informed while it feels nothing but delight; and if pictures have been accounted the books of idiots, behold here the benefit of an image without the offence. It is no shame for us to learn wit of heathens, neither is it material in whose school we take out a good lesson. Yea, it is more shame not to follow their good than not to lead them better. As one, therefore, that in worthy examples hold imitation better than invention, I have trod in their paths, but with an higher and wider step, and out of their tablets have drawn these larger portraitures of both sorts. More might be said, I deny not, of every virtue, of every vice; I desired not to say all but enough. If thou do but read or like these I have spent good hours ill; but if thou shalt hence abjure those vices, which before thou thoughtest not ill-favoured, or fall in love with any of these goodly faces of virtue, or shalt hence find where thou hast any little touch of these evils, to clear thyself, or where any defect in these graces to supply it, neither of us shall need to repent of our labour.