Sir William Cornwallis the Younger achieved a measure of popularity in his own time; today, however, he is only occasionally remembered as one of the originators of the essay in England, one of the participants in the vogue of paradox writing at the turn of the seventeenth century, and one of the many associates of John Donne. As an essayist he is the first to register in England the influence of Michel de Montaigne, writing with something of the Frenchman's diffuse candor, while as a paradoxer he both rejuvenates hackneyed subjects and ventures dangerous ones. Informing almost the whole of Cornwallis's writings is an imperative to live a life of virtue, an imperative that manifests itself particularly in his calls to his readers to overcome adversity and resist moral corruption.

A notation in Tanner manuscript 169 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, records that Cornwallis was twenty-two in 1600, which would...