Clove and Orange.  An inseparable case of coxcombs, city born; the Gemini, or twins of foppery; that, like a pair of wooden foils, are fit for nothing but to be practised upon.  Being well flattered they’ll lend money, and repent when they have done.  Their glory is to invite players, and make suppers.  And in company of better rank, to avoid the suspect of insufficiency, will enforce their ignorance most desperately, to set upon the understanding of anything.  Orange is the most humorous of the two, whose small portion of juice being squeezed out, Clove serves to stick him with commendations.

Cordatus.  The author’s friend; a man inly acquainted with the scope and drift of his plot; of a discreet and understanding judgment; and has the place of a moderator.

Mitis.  Is a person of no action, and therefore we have reason to afford him no character.

Of this kind are the

CHARACTERS

BY

SIR THOMAS OVERBURY,

which were not published until_ 1614, the year after their writer’s death, at the age of thirty-two; but they may have been written earlier than the “Characters of Virtues and Vices”—­ethical characters—­written by Joseph Hall, which were first published in 1609.

Sir Thomas Overbury died poisoned in the Tower on the 15_th of September_ 1613. On the 5_th of January_ 1606, by desire of James the First, the young Earl of Essex, aged fourteen, had been married to the Lady Frances Howard, aged thirteen, the younger daughter of the Earl of Suffolk.  Ben Jonson’s “Masque of Hymen” was produced at Court in celebration of that union.  The young Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex, had good qualities too solid for the taste of a frivolous girl; and when, after travel abroad, the husband of eighteen claimed the wife of seventeen, he found her happy in flirtation with the King’s favourite, Sir Robert Carr.  Though compelled to live with her husband, she repelled all his advances, and after three years of this repugnance tried for a divorce.  The King’s Scotch favourite, Carr, had been made, in March 1611, an English peer, as Viscount Rochester, when the age of the young Countess of Essex was nineteen.  He was the man highest in King James’s favour.  If the divorce sought by the Countess early in 1613 were obtained for her, it was understood that Carr would marry her, and that support of the divorce would be a way to future benefit through his good offices.  Thus she obtained the support of her father and uncle, the Earls of Suffolk and Northampton.  The King’s influence went with the wishes of the favourite.  The trial, in 1613, ending in a decree of nullity of marriage, was a four months’ scandal in the land.  Among the familiar friends of Robert Carr, Lord Rochester, was Sir Thomas Overbury, born in Warwickshire in 1581, and knighted by King James in 1608.  He strongly opposed the policy of a divorce obtained