being in 1664, two years before the fire of London.  By this time the original set of twenty-one Characters had been considerably increased, “with additions of New Characters and many other Witty Conceits never before Printed;” so that Overbury’s Characters, which had from the first included a few pieces written by his friends, became a name for the most popular miscellany of pieces of Character Writing current in the Seventeenth Century, and shows how wit was exercised in this way by half-a-dozen or more of the mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease.  These are the pieces thus at last made current as

SIR THOMAS OVERBURY’S CHARACTERS;

OR,

WITTY DESCRIPTIONS OF THE PROPERTIES OF SUNDRY PERSONS.

* * * * *

A GOOD WOMAN.

A Good Woman is a comfort, like a man.  She lacks of him nothing but heat.  Thence is her sweetness of disposition, which meets his stoutness more pleasingly; so wool meets iron easier than iron, and turns resisting into embracing.  Her greatest learning is religion, and her thoughts are on her own sex, or on men, without casting the difference.  Dishonesty never comes nearer than her ears, and then wonder stops it out, and saves virtue the labour.  She leaves the neat youth telling his luscious tales, and puts back the serving-man’s putting forward with a frown:  yet her kindness is free enough to be seen, for it hath no guilt about it; and her mirth is clear, that you may look through it into virtue, but not beyond.  She hath not behaviour at a certain, but makes it to her occasion.  She hath so much knowledge as to love it; and if she have it not at home, she will fetch it, for this sometimes in a pleasant discontent she dares chide her sex, though she use it never the worse.  She is much within, and frames outward things to her mind, not her mind to them.  She wears good clothes, but never better; for she finds no degree beyond decency.  She hath a content of her own, and so seeks not an husband, but finds him.  She is indeed most, but not much of description, for she is direct and one, and hath not the variety of ill.  Now she is given fresh and alive to a husband, and she doth nothing more than love him, for she takes him to that purpose.  So his good becomes the business of her actions, and she doth herself kindness upon him.  After his, her chiefest virtue is a good husband.  For she is he.

A VERY WOMAN.

A Very Woman is a dough-baked man, or a She meant well towards man, but fell two bows short, strength and understanding.  Her virtue is the hedge, modesty, that keeps a man from climbing over into her faults.  She simpers as if she had no teeth but lips; and she divides her eyes, and keeps half for herself, and gives the other to her neat youth.  Being set down, she casts her face into a platform, which dureth the meal, and is taken away with the voider.