are
not guilty, and defending himself when he is not accused: and no man is
undone more with apologies, wherein he is so elaborately excessive, that
none will believe him; and he is never thought worse of, than when he
has given satisfaction. Such men can never have friends, because they
cannot trust so far; and this humour hath this infection with it, it
makes all men to them suspicious. In conclusion, they are men always in
offence and vexation with themselves and their neighbours, wronging
others in thinking they would wrong them, and themselves most of all in
thinking they deserve it.

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 characteri