Microcosmography

John Earle wrote these short prose portraits in the 1620s, in the tradition of Theophrastus: take a familiar type and pin it down in a page or two of compressed, needling prose. Most of his subjects are people, from the plain country fellow to the pot poet to the young raw preacher, a proficient in nothing but boldness, who preaches sermon notes he copied down at Oxford. A few are places: a tavern, and Paul’s Walk, the aisle of old St Paul’s where London went to gossip. The wit is dry rather than cruel, and the moral judgment usually arrives wrapped in a joke. Published anonymously in 1628, it ran through ten editions in Earle’s lifetime, though his name did not appear on it until the eighteenth century. It is generally rated the best of the English character books.