and tokens employs the author dumb; and if Ovid, who writ the law of love, were alive (as he is extant), he would allow it as good a diversity that gifts should be sent as gratuities, not as bribes.  Wit getteth rather promise than love.  Wit is not to be seen, and no woman takes advice of any in her loving but of her own eyes and her waiting-woman’s; nay, which is worse, wit is not to be felt, and so no good bedfellow.  Wit applied to a woman makes her dissolve her simpering and discover her teeth with laughter, and this is surely a purge of love, for the beginning of love is a kind of foolish melancholy.  As for the man that makes his tailor his means, and hopes to inveigle his love with such a coloured suit, surely the same deeply hazards the loss of her favour upon every change of his clothes.  So likewise for the other that courts her silently with a good body, let me certify him, that his clothes depend upon the comeliness of his body, and so both upon opinion.  She that hath been seduced by apparel let me give her to wit, that men always put off their clothes before they go to bed.  And let her that hath been enamoured of her servant’s body understand, that if she saw him in a skin of cloth, that is, in a suit made of the pattern of his body, she would see slender cause to love him ever after.  There is no clothes sit so well in a woman’s eye as a suit of steel, though not of the fashion, and no man so soon surpriseth a woman’s affections as he that is the subject of all whispering, and hath always twenty stories of his own deeds depending upon him.  Mistake me not; I understand not by valour one that never fights but when he is backed with drink or anger, or hissed on with beholders, nor one that is desperate, nor one that takes away a serving-man’s weapons when perchance it cost him his quarter’s wages, nor yet one that wears a privy coat of defence and therein is confident, for then such as made bucklers would be counted the Catilines of the commonwealth.  I intend one of an even resolution grounded upon reason, which is always even, having his power restrained by the law of not doing wrong.  But now I remember I am for valour, and therefore must be a man of few words.

JOSEPH HALL’S

CHARACTERS OF VICES AND VIRTUES

were published four years earlier than Overbury’s, but Overbury’s were posthumous, and in actual time of writing there can have been no very material difference.  Hall’s age was thirty-four when he first published his Characters.  He was born on the 1st July 1574, at Ashby de la Zouch, in Leicestershire.  His father was governor of this town under the Earl of Huntingdon, when he was President of the North.  His mother, Winifred, was a devout Puritan, and he was from infancy intended for the Church.  In 1589, at the age of fifteen, Joseph Hall was sent to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he was maintained at the cost of an uncle.  He passed all his degrees with applause, obtained a Fellowship of his college in 1595, and proceeded to M.A. in 1596, and having already obtained credit at Cambridge as an English poet, he published in 1597 “Virgidemiarum, Sixe Bookes, First Three Books of Toothlesse Satyrs, Poetical, Academical, Moral, followed in the next year by Three last Bookes of Byting Satyres.”  Of these Satires he said in their Prologue—­