CLARENDON says that Earle was “of a conversation so pleasant and delightful, so very innocent, and so very facetious, that no man’s company was more desired and loved.” Those who read “Microcosmography: or, A Piece of the World Discovered in Essays and Characters,” written by Earle in imitation of Theophrastus, will know for themselves that all Clarendon says, and more, is justified by the facts. Earle is one of those very rare and always delightful essayists who, when they have told all they really know of one subject, know how to stop and take up another. The title of his essays any one may translate from “Microcosmography” into “A Description of the Microcosm,” but it is not every one, perhaps, who will remember that according to Hermes Trismegistus and others of equally venerable authority, the mind and soul of man will give those who really understand them a microscopic view of the mind and soul of “the great universe,”—“the Macrocosm.” This theory of man’s relation to the universe Earle has always in view, but it does not make him too serious, nor could any theory make him dull. His essays are the best of their class in English, and they are not surpassed in French, not even by La Bruyère, who, if he is often more witty, lacks the admirable sense of proportion which gives Earle his place with Bacon at the head of the list of essayists who know how to be brief without becoming either disconnected or obscure.

  Born at York about the year 1601, Earle was educated at Oxford for the Church. After his graduation he became proctor of the university, and in 1642 he was elected to the celebrated Westminster Assembly. Being a strong Royalist, he declined to sit, and after the defeat of the Stuarts at Worcester he went into exile with them. After the Restoration he was chaplain to the king, who made him a bishop in 1662. He died November 17th, 1665, leaving a reputation for good-nature and kindness of heart, which is fully borne out by even the most satirical of his essays. It may fairly be said that his is the best and least Ciceronian English prose of the reign of Charles II., for in spite of his classical learning he uses the genuine English syntax of King Alfred,—short sentences with few and short dependent clauses. His essay on “A Child” is a work of genius both in thought and in expression. Perhaps it is the deepest as it is the simplest of all his “pieces of the world characterized,” but they are all works of genius.