e,
therefore, not all from one hand. Their popularity is indicated by the
fact that in the next year, 1615, they reached a sixth edition. Three
more editions were published in 1616. This was because interest in the
book had been heightened by the Great Oyer of Poisoning, the trial in
May 1616 of the Earl and Countess of Somerset for Overbury's murder, of
which both were found guilty, though the Countess took all guilt upon
herself. Then followed a tenth edition in 1618, an eleventh in 1622, a
twelfth in 1627, a thirteenth in 1628, a fourteenth in 1630, a fifteenth
in 1632, a sixteenth in 1638; and then a pause, the seventeenth 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 m