her.  Yes (quoth he), I know her well, and have bespoken her for your wife.  When I farther demanded an account of that answer, he told me she was the daughter of a gentleman whom he much respected, Mr. George Winniff, of Bretenham; that out of an opinion had of the fitness of that match for me, he had already treated with her father about it, whom he found very apt to entertain it, advising me not to neglect the opportunity, and not concealing the just praises of modesty, piety, good disposition, and other virtues that were lodged in that seemly presence.  I listened to the motion as sent from God, and at last, upon due prosecution, happily prevailed, enjoying the comfortable society of that meet help for the space of forty-nine years.”

In 1605 Joseph Hall published at Frankfort in Latin a witty satire on the weak side of the world, which had been written several years earlier, entitled “Mundus Alter et Idem.”  Of this book I have given a description in the volume of “Ideal Commonwealths,” which forms one of the series of the “Universal Library.”  Hall had obtained reputation as a divine, by publishing two centuries of religious “Meditations,” which united wit with piety.  Prince Henry, having sought an opportunity of hearing him preach, made Hall his chaplain, and the Earl of Norwich gave him the living of Waltham in Essex.  At the same time, 1608, a translation of Hall’s Latin Satire, printed twice abroad, was published in London as “The Discovery of a New World;” he himself published also two volumes of Epistles, and this book of “Characters.”  There was a long career before him as a leader among churchmen fallen upon troubled days.  He became Bishop of Exeter and was translated to Norwich.  He was committed to the Tower, released, and ejected from his see, and after ten years of retirement, living upon narrow means at the village of Higham near Norwich, he died in the Commonwealth time at the age of eighty-two, on the 8th of September 1656.  He took a conspicuous part in the controversy of 1641 about the bishops, but twenty years before that date a collection of his earlier works had formed a substantial folio of more than eleven hundred pages.  His “Characters of Virtues and Vices,” written in early manhood, follow next in our collection.

CHARACTERS OF VIRTUES AND VICES.

IN TWO BOOKS.

BY JOSEPH HALL.

A PREMONITION or THE TITLE AND USE OF CHARACTERS.

Reader,—­The divines of the old heathens were their moral philosophers.  These received the acts of an inbred law, in the Sinai of nature, and delivered them with many expositions to the multitude.  These were the overseers of manners, correctors of vices, directors of lives, doctors of virtue, which yet taught their people the body of their natural divinity, not after one manner:  while some spent themselves in deep discourses of human felicity and the way to it in common, others thought it best to