Statesman and author; born at Ilmington, Warrickshire, England, in 1581; educated at Queen’s College, Oxford, and graduated 1598; traveled on the Continent; became a resident of Edinburgh 1601, where he was an intimate friend of Robert Carr, afterwards Viscount Rochester and Earl of Somerset; was knighted 1608; traveled on the Continent 1609; wrote “Observations upon the State of the Seventeen United Provinces;” incurred the enmity of his former friend, Lord Rochester, and of the Countess of Essex, by his opposition to their criminal intrigues; refused a foreign mission offered him as a means of removing him from the kingdom, and was thereupon thrown into the Tower, where he was cruelly treated, and died Sept. 15, 1613. In 1619 Lord Rochester, then Earl of Somerset, and his countess were convicted of having poisoned Overbury. His popular volume of “Characters” was published posthumously in 1614.
Overbury was first his friend, then turn’d his mortall enimie.
| And as the Hebrews in an obscure pit | |
| Their holy Fire hid, not extinguish’d it, | |
| And after time, that broke their bondage chaine, | |
| Found it, to fire their sacrifice againe: | |
| So lay thy Worth some while, but being found, | |
| The Muses’ altars plentifully crown’d | |
| With sweet perfumes by it new kindled be, | |
| And offer all to thy dear Memorie. | |
| Nor haue we lost thee long: thou art not gone, | |
| Nor canst descend into Obliuion. | |
| But twice the Sunne went round since thy soule fled, | |
| And onely that time men shall terme thee dead. | |
| Hereafter (rais’d to life) thou still shalt haue | |
| An antidote against the silent Graue. |
| The noble Overbury’s Quill has left | |
| A better Wife, than he could ever find…. | |
| … Strange power of womankind, | |
| To raise, and ruin; for all he will claim | |
| Is from that Sex: his Birth, his Death, his Fame. |
Bred in Oxford, and attained to be a most accomplished Gentleman, which the happiness of his Pen, both in Poetry and Prose, doth declare. In the latter he was the first writer of Characters of our Nation, so far as I have observed. But, if the great parts of this Gentleman were guilty of insolency and petulancy, which some since have charged on his memory; we may charitably presume that his reduced age would have corrected such juvenile extravagancies. It is questionable, whether Robert Carre, Earl of Somerset, were more in the favour of King James, or this Sir Thomas Overbury in the favour of the Earl of Somerset, until he lost it by disswading that Lord from keeping company with a Lady (the Wife of another Person of Honour), as neither for his credit here, or comfort hereafter.
Sir Thomas was about 32 years old when he was murthered, and is said to have possessed an accuteness, and strength of parts that was astonishing; and some have related that he was proud of his abilities, and over-bearing in company; but as there is no good authority for the assertion, it is more agreeable to candour to believe him the amiable knight Winstanley draws him; as it seldom happens that a soul formed for the noble quality of friendship is haughty and insolent. There is a tragedy of Sir Thomas Overbury wrote by the late Richard Savage, son of earl Rivers, which was acted in 1723, (by what was then usually called The Summer Company) with success.
Few poems have been more popular than Overbury’s “Wife;” owing partly to the good sense with which it abounds, and partly to the interesting and tragic circumstances which accompanied the author’s fate. It was speedily and frequently imitated.
His “Characters, or Witty Descriptions of the Properities of Sundry Persons,” is a work of considerable merit; but unfortunately his prose, as well as his verse, has a dryness and quaintness that seem to oppress the natural movement of his thoughts. As a poet, he has few imposing attractions: his beauties must be fetched by repeated perusal. They are those of solid reflection, predominating over, but not extinguishing, sensibility; and there is danger of the reader neglecting, under the coldness and ruggedness of his manner, the manly but unostentatious moral feeling that is conveyed in his maxims, which are sterling and liberal, if we can only pardon a few obsolete ideas on female education.
As a poet, he was perhaps not remarkable for any particular graces of expression, or smoothness of versification; yet his poem of “The Wife”—no small favourite in its day—contains some pretty passages, and a host of precepts which even the most fastidious will hardly dispute. It is upon his “Characters” that Overbury’s fame must chiefly rest; and here he displays the fertile and observant powers of his mind, great ingenuity of conceit, and a force of expression rarely equalled by any of the numerous followers of Theophrastus.
Sir Thomas Overbury’s “Characters” are interesting illustrations of contemporary manners, and a mine of foot-notes to the works of better men,—but, with the exception of “The Fair and Happy Milkmaid,” they are dull enough to have pleased James the First; his “Wife” is a cento of far-fetched conceits,—here a tomtit, and there a hen mistaken for a pheasant, like the contents of a cockney’s game-bag, and his chief interest for us lies in his having been mixed up with an inexplicable tragedy and poisoned in the Tower, not without suspicion of royal complicity.
In Overbury’s “Characters” we not only meet with the Englishman of the day, the milkmaid, tinker, soldier, yeoman, or franklin, and the clown, or plain countryman, but we see the lines laid down whereon Dickens and Thackeray, who may never have seen the book, build their descriptive characters. Above all, when the student meets with these books he may be certain that he holds in his hands sound honest thought, not very acute, not very high, but thought; not mere words spun into never-ending, bombastic sentences.
Overbury was widely popular in his day. His spirit kindled kindred spirits. His originality of tone and treatment; his graphic delineation; the Dutch-like pictures, the neat sentences pointed to an apophthegm, or rounded with a witticism, found the truest test that admiration can take, that of imitation. But in after years the tide of popularity quite turned. Even those authors who delight in the quaint beauty and the picturesque prose of our old writers, seem to have no knowledge of him. Johnson preserves an ominous silence when we mention the author of “the unmatcht Poeme, the Wife.” Of all the lovers of character and the sweet old prose, Charles Lamb, who was charmed with Kit Marlowe’s luscious smoothness, “beds of roses, buckles of gold” style, knows not our author by name; and among De Quincey’s curious essays, and more curious footnotes, we have in vain searched for evidence that he knew of him. Even Macaulay does not make mention of his name or his writings. Others are acquainted with Overbury only to depreciate him; stately Hallam pats the knight with a mild reference, and dismisses his characters with a Gerard Dow comparison. He appears to us to deserve a better fate, and his “characters” live before us in a very real manner. Country and domestic life, courtier life, the duns, the whims and fashions of contemporary manners, are etched in his pages with poetic imagery, a rare if sometimes coarse skill, and a graphic veracity which make them still worthy of notice, and may reward the reader who loves characteristic bits of old manners set in quaintly vivid phraseology.
Sir Thomas Overbury’s “Characters,” written in the Baconian age, are found delightful by some; but for my own part, though I have striven to follow the critic’s golden rule, to have preferences but no exclusions, Overbury has for me no savour.
The social prominence and mysterious murder of Sir Thomas Overbury gave an exaggerated interest to his brief posthumous exercise in verse, “A Wife,” 1614, and to his version of Ovid’s “Remedy of Love,” 1620.
Overbury’s chief work, “A Wife now the Widdow of Sir T. Overburye,” a sensible little poem on marriage, of slender poetic merit, was first published in London in 1614. It was licensed for the press on 13 Dec. 1613, and became exceptionally popular, five editions appearing in 1614. One of the last lines—
| He comes too near who comes to be denied,— |
