his observations to climb to God." He, too, was "free from vice, because
he had no occasion to employ it." "Such gifts," said the turbulent Bishop
Atterbury of him, "I did not think had been the portion of any but
angels." After this it is no hyperbole to say, as Earle does of the
contemplative man, "He has learnt all can here be taught him, and comes
now to heaven to see more."

Though Clarendon does full justice to Earle's personal charm, he uses the
epithets "sharp and witty" to describe his published "discourses"; and the
piercing severity of his wit is illustrated everywhere in this book. It is
clear, however, from the sympathetic sketches that Earle's was no _nil
admirari_ doctrine, and that while he saw grave need on all hands for men
to clear their mind of cant, and their company of those who live by it, he
had great store of affection for all that is noble or noble in the making.

The "modest man" and the high-spirited man" are opposite types, but there
is in both the worthy pursuit and the high ideal. Moreover, the second of
those characters reveals a power of pathos which Earle might have
developed with more opportunity.[S] "The child" whom "his father has writ
as his own little story" is another indication of the same mood.

These sketches are full of suggestive melancholy--not the melancholy of
the misanthrope, but the true melancholy--the melancholy of
Virgil--_Invalidus etiamque tremens etiam inscius aevi._[T]

There is another character drawn with a most incisive pathos, though less
_Virgilian_[U] in its tone.

The poor man, "with whom even those that are not friends _for ends_ love
not a dearness," and who, "with a great deal of virtue, obtains of himself
not to hate men," is a pathetic figure, but he is something more. He is a
sermon on human weakness, not drawn as some Iago might have drawn it with
exultant mockery, but with the painful unflinching veracity of one who is
ashamed of himself and of his kind. When one thinks how often this
weakness is spoken of as if it were peculiar to the moneyed class or to
the uneducated, and how many people whom one knows act and think as if
poverty were a vice if not a crime, though they shrink from avowing it, so
unqualified an exposure indicates a conscience of no common sensitiveness.

Earle's wit and humour are deadly weapons, and it must be said that the
trades and professions are treated with scant indulgence. He can even
leave a mark like that of Juniu