John Hoskyns was perhaps the most renowned English rhetorician of his generation, even though his book on rhetoric was not printed until 1935. Circulating only in manuscript, his "Direccions for Speech and Style" significantly shaped prose style in the early seventeenth century. Ben Jonson, Thomas Blount, and John Smith borrowed extensively from Hoskyns's work for their own writings on rhetoric, and both Jonson and Sir Walter Ralegh credited him with "polishing" their style. Hoskyns was also a celebrated poet in the metaphysical vein, whose poems were sometimes confused with those of his contemporary and friend, John Donne. Hoskyns's son, Benedict (or Bennett), told the seventeenth-century biographer John Aubrey that he lost a manuscript volume of his father's poems that was larger than the published collection of his more famous counterpart.

Hoskyns thus distinguished himself in the company of remarkable men. A list of his friends reads like a who's...