NICHOLAS BRETON

Published in 1615 “Characters upon Essays, Moral and Divine” and in 1616 a set of Characters called “The Good and the Bad.”  He was of a good Essex family, second son of William Breton of Redcross Street, in the parish of St. Giles without Cripplegate.  His father was well-to-do, and died in January 1559 (new style) when Nicholas was a boy.  His mother took for second husband George Gascoigne the poet.  Only a chance note in a diary informs us that Nicholas Breton was once of Oriel College, Oxford.  In 1577, when his stepfather Gascoigne died, Breton was living in London, and he then published the first of his many books.  He married Ann Sutton in the church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, on the 14th of January 1593 (new style), had a son Henry, born in 1603, a son Edward in 1606, and a daughter Matilda in 1607, who died in her nineteenth year.  He was from 1577 onward an active writer both of prose and verse, and a poet of real mark in the days of Elizabeth and James the First, though it was left to Dr. A. B. Grosart to be, in 1875-79, the first editor of his collected works in an edition limited to a hundred copies.  The date of Breton’s last publication, “Fantastics,” is 1626, but of the time of his death there is no record, Nicholas Breton’s “Characters upon Essaies” published in 1615, were entitled in full “Characters upon Essaies Morall and Divine, written for those good spirits that will take them ’in good part, and make use of them to good purpose.”  In recognition of the kinship between Bacon’s Essays and Character writings, they were dedicated

    To the Honourable, and my much worthy honoured,
truly learned, and Judicious Knight, SIR FRANCIS BACON,
        his Maties.  Attorney General,
    Increase of honour, health, and eternal happiness.

Worthy knight, I have read of many essays and a kind of charactering of them, by such, as when I looked unto the form or nature of their writing I have been of the conceit that they were but imitators of your breaking the ice to their inventions, which, how short they fall of your worth, I had rather think than speak, though truth need not blush at her blame.  Now, for myself, unworthy to touch near the rock of those diamonds, or to speak in their praise, who so far exceed the power of my capacity, vouchsafe me leave yet, I beseech you, among those apes that would counterfeit the actions of men, to play the like part with learning, and as a monkey that would make a face like a man and cannot, so to write like a scholar and am not; and thus not daring to adventure the print under your patronage, without your favourable allowance in the devoted service of my bounden duty, I leave these poor travails of my spirit to the perusing of your pleasing leisure, with the further fruits of my humble affection, to the happy employment of your honourable pleasure.—­At your service in all humbleness,