AN " tDITION DE LUXE" OF EARLE'S " MICRO-COSMO GRAPHIE."
* THE Cambridge University Press has produced a very handsome edition of Earle's Micro-cosmographie ; and as the taste of the modern book-fancier is for good paper, ample page, and liberal margin, this pleasantly got up quarto volume may do something towards making Earle's book and Earle himself better known than he has been of late in the world that reads,—though perhaps the thing more needed from this point of view is a reprint a little less ambitious in form, with a short biographical introduction, and just enough editing to remove the very few difficulties of the text. For students there are already Dr. Bliss's edition of 1811, Mr. Arber's reprint of 1868, and the Pitt Press edition (1897), with Mr. West's ample commentary, biography, intro- duction, and notes. But the affectionate reader who is neither book-fancier, student, nor schoolboy likes a pocket edition of a book of this kind,—something more like the little old brown volumes in which the " Essayes and Characters" appeared during the author's lifetime.
Born in 1600 or 1601—the date is doubtful—John Earle was twenty-eight when Edward Blount, the publisher of the first folio edition of Shakespeare, collected the "Essayes and Characters" already circulating freely in manuscript copies among the writer's College friends, and published them in a very modest volume, with a short introduction or dedication to the reader setting forth the reason why the anonymous author had become "unwillingly willing" that his fugitive pieces should be given the permanent form of print. The expediency of anonymity arose out of the circumstance that Earle was in Holy Orders, and the taste of the day dis- approved of clergymen who amused themselves with light literary work. Earle was a wit and a bumourist as well as a moralist, and it was more than probable that the epigrams which diverted his friends would give offence to ecclesiastical patrons and dignities. But apart from this motive of professional prudence there was no reason for concealing the authorship. The Micro-cosmographic contains nothing contrary to religion, morality, or pro- priety, though, being a seventeenth-century book, it has, of course, a few passages and expressions which are more direct and plain-spoken than our modern taste approves. Far from being a cynic, Earle was one of the gentlest, tenderest, most affectionate, and most generally beloved of men,—" man of great piety and devotion, a most eloquent and power- ful preacher, and of a conversation so pleasant and delightful, so very innocent and so very facetious, that no man's company was more desired and loved." From the testimonies of his contemporaries one gets the impression of a character of singular humanness, mellow even in youth, and fresh and simple to the end of his days. If dates were not forthcoming to prove that be wrote the Micro-cosmographie while he was still in the years between twenty and thirty, one would suspect it of being the work of an old, or at any rate an elderly, man with ripe experience of life. But the peculiar balance of judgment, the sympathetic insight, the large charity, and the wisdom that was proof against all the plausible false shows of the world were in Earle the outcome of a constitutional moderation of temperament. His genius anticipated the lessons of life, and we find in his book of " Essayes and Characters" the promise of his own character as it came to be known in his career, rather than the condensation of the knowledge gained by experience.
"A Stayed Man is a Man" is the fitting heading and first sentence of one of the most admirable "characters," and such a man must John Earle have been at five-and- twenty, the age at which he probably "threw off" the sketches of the "child," the "young man," the "good old man " ; differentiated the "formall man" from the " complementall man," and the " complementa,ll man" from the "plausible man" ; read the heart of the "modest man" ; and saw through the hollowness of the "vulgar-spirited man," who "follows merely the common crye, and makes it louder by one measures the happiness of the Xingdome by the cheapness of corn; and conceives no harme of State but ill-trading." To Earle's vision it was a very wide extent of human nature
* Micro-costrwgraphier or, A Piece of the Worlde Discovered ; in Essayes and Characters. By John Earle. Printed from the Sixth Anmented Edition of AM, Cambridge; at the University Press. [21s. net.]
that came "within this compasse" of the "vulgar-spirited," even all those "that are too much wedg'd into the world, and have no lifting thoughts above those things ; that call to thrive well, to doe well, and preferments only the grace of God. That ayme all studies at this marke, and shew you poore schollers as an example to take heed by. That think the Prison and want, a judgment for some sinne, and never like well hereafter of a Jayle-bird. That know no other content but wealth, bravery, and the Towne-pleasures ; that think all else but idle speculation, and the philosophers madmen."
Every sentence of this is good, though the abstract proposi- tions might be mere warmings-up of second-hand reflections ; but in the touch of "never liking well hereafter of a Jayle- bird" we have a bold bit of unmistakable reality and originality. One would like to know what was the experi- ence of men who had been in prison and of their judges in the respectable world that prompted the sentence. But of this Earle's record tells us nothing. Of prison life he cer- tainly had a more than hearsay knowledge even in these early prosperous years, or he could not have written of it with such poignant truth and sympathy :—
" Men huddle up their Life here [in prison] as a thing of no use, and weare it out like an old suite, the faster the better : and
hoethat deceives the time best, best spends it Men see here much sin and much calamity ; and where the last does not mortifie, the other hardens, and, those that are worse here are desperately worse, as those from whom the horror of sinne is taken off, and the punishment familiar. And commonly a hard thought passes on all, that come from this schools; which though it teach much wisdome, it is too late, and with danger : and it is better bee a fools, then come here to learne it."
Studies of life and character such as make up the Micro. cosmographic are not easily done justice to by quotation. They are too condensed in form and too completely thought out within their limits to bear abridgment. To separate a part is generally to do injustice to the whole where the vein is deep and substance is the main consideration. And, on the other hand, to attempt to represent Earle by a string of epigrams chosen for the smart conciseness of their form were to give an unfair impression of the man, in whom human reality was so much more than form, though he added to soundness of sense the external grace of literary perfection. Yet here and there a true thought tersely expressed may be detached from the context as an example of his skill in epigram. Such are the definitions of the weak man as "a child at man's estate, one whom Nature huddled up in haste, and left his best part unfurnish'd " ; of the affected man "as an extraordinary man in ordinary things"; of the child that is "a man in a small Letter, yet the best copy of Adam before he tasted of Eve or the apple." But we know Earle better when we follow his thought in the development of the child through the "young man," "the stayed man," to the ultimate perfection of human nature in "the good old man." The individuality of the author, the bias of his own mind, is indi- cated by his recurring depreciation of all negative and superficial characters; he has no sympathy with lean souls, and turns ruthlessly inside out the emptiness of the time- server, the waiter upon opinion, the shallow trafficker in mean conventions of social intercourse, the " meere formall man " :—
"When you have seen his outside, you have lookt through him and need employ your discovery no further. His reason is merely example ; and his action is not guided by his under- standing, but he sees other men doe this, and he follows them. He is a Negative, for we cannot call him a wise man, but not a fool ; nor an honest man, but not a knave ; nor a Protestant, but not a Papist. The chiefe burden of his braine is the carriage of his body and the setting of his face in a good frame : which lice performs the better, because he is not disjoynted with other meditations. His Religion is a good quiet subject, and he prays as he swears in the Phrase of the Land. . . . . . His businesses with his friends are to visit them, and whilst the business is no more he can performe this well enough. His discourse is the newes that he bath gathered in his walke, and for other matters his discretion is, that hee will only what he can, that is, say nothing. His life is like one that runs to the Church-walke, to take a turne or two and so passes. He hath staid in the world to fill a number; and when he is gone. there wants one, and there's an end."
Educated at Christchurch and Merton, Earle lived a College life till he was over thirty ; and his knowledge of men was more than his understanding of women. He was one of the dearest friends Lord Falkland gathered about him at Great Tew, and "would frequently profess that be had got more useful learning by his conversation at Tew than he had
at Oxford." In 1632 he became rector of Gamlingay. In 1639 Lord Pembroke presented him to the living of Bishop- stone, in Wiltshire, and soon afterwards he was appointed chaplain and tutor to Prince Charles. When the Civil War began Earle's part was with the King. He was nominated a member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines in 1643; but he declined to sit, and before long followed the Stuarts into exile. After the Restoration his loyalty was rewarded by preferment. He was made, in rapid succession, Dean of Westminster, Bishop of Winchester, and Bishop of Salisbury. He used his prosperity graciously, and was the steady opponent of all measures of retaliation against the Puritans, winning the respect and affection of the Dissenters, at the same time that he retained till death the warm friendship of Charles II. "Would that they were all such ! " wrote Dr. Baxter on a letter from Earle touching his own differences with the Church of England. Burnet records that the King "would never see or hear of any one thing amiss in him." And Bishop Kennet wondered how it was possible for any man "to have lived so many years in the Court of England, so near to his Majesty, and yet not given the least offence to any man alive; though both in and out of the pulpit, he used all Christian freedom against the vanities of this age." The testimonies to his charm, his "obliging nature," his guilelessness, are remarkable in their unanimity of praise. But perhaps the prettiest phrase is that of Izaak Walton, who commends his "innocent wisdom."
The new Cambridge Press edition is a reprint from the "sixth augmented edition" of 1633, and a boast is made of the faithful transcription of old-fashioned spelling and punctua- tion. Up to a certain point this kind of faithfulness is good, but that point is overstepped when an obvious misprint that spoils the sense is reproduced without even an explanatory note. Earle characterised "the stayed man" as "one whose if I can is more than another's assurance, and his doubtful tale before some men's protestations." But in the particular edition now chosen for reproduction a semicolon crept in after the word " another's," the mark of the possessive case disappeared, and the passage became nonsense. In other editions, both prior and subsequent to that of 1633, the printer's error does not appear. Yet the Cambridge Press editors have thought fit to reprint the senseless blunder. One wonders why.
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