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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1903 Excerpt: ...the Jew of Malta's nose, and not a few Shakespearean expressions. Very Bretrmian is Cold Doings in London, the Greit Frost of 1608, in a dialogue between a citizen and an old yeoman from Ripon. Common Cursetors, or Vagabones, a curious series of essays on various kinds of thieves, tramps and beggars, with their slang. Hannan was freely imitated, not to say copied, by Dekker, in his Selman of London, while Dtekker had independently produced something closely approximating character-sketches in his Batchelor's Banquet of 1603, as had several of the writers of the innumerable Touchstones, Glasses, Mirrours and Anatomies, whom we notice at the end of this section. But such productions as these could hardly have led to the Theophrastian essay, at which, as we should have expected, first attempts were made by notable scholars--to wit, Joseph Hall and Ben Jonson. Most of Jonson's plays are 'character' plays, and in the dramatis personae of Every Man out of Ms Humour, first printed in 1600, he condenses his conceptions into the form of a series of labels which are in effect character-sketches. Joseph Hall, who had in 1597 produced his Toothlesse Satyrs, and in 1605 (in Latin) his strange satirical allegory of Mundus Alter et Idem, allowed to appear in 1608 his noteworthy Characters of Veriues and Vices in two Bookes. Hall's 'Characterisms, ' as he calls them, are directly modelled on Theophrastus; pithy and well-balanced, his phrasing gave the note to all his successors; but the tone of the work is too abstract, and the moralizing and balancing of good qualities against bad is unnecessarily obtruded. Yet his Characters may be regarded as signalling the vogue, of which the full force was felt some six years later in A Wife, now the Widow of Sir Thomas Overbury... 'wh...

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