ABSTRACT
Thus, in 1593, with the verse of Spenser, Sidney, Peele, and Watson murmured around him, soft and voluptuous measures Italianating the rude tongues of the
boy of twenty speaks to us.
fantastic libels against individuals like those of Marston, but a series of humorous and sardonic portraits of types. The edition of Theophrastus, which Casaubon was to revolutionise European belles-lettres by publishing in 1598, was still unknown, but Scaliger had more vaguely drawn attention to this class of ironic portraiture. Each of Donne’s satires is woven about some such type as the Theophrastians a little later loved to define and describe.
