Joseph Hall produced a substantial body of works that had a significant impact on seventeenth-century English prose. Perhaps best known for his claim to be the "first English satirist," Hall was also an important innovator in prose: he introduced the Theophrastan character sketch and the formal prose epistle into English; he exemplified the fashionable Senecan, or curt, style in these and other works; he wrote what is now regarded as a major devotional treatise, The Arte of Divine Meditation (1606); and he experimented in a variety of meditative prose genres. Hall knew, or was known to, major writers: he was attacked in satires by John Marston; he was a close friend of John Donne and wrote poetic prefaces for Donne's Anniversaries (1611, 1612); he was attacked by John Milton in a pamphlet war in the 1640s; and he was tended in his later years in Norwich by his friend and physician...