ABSTRACT
Nicholas Breton, with his protean ability to assume literary attitudes from the ponderously solemn to the naively whimsical, was most successful in the fragile mosaic of the Fantasticks. Breton was praised in a dedicatory poem for his "Lipsian stile, terse Phrase." He placed in opposition twenty-five pairs of characters good and bad. The almost incantatory cadence is more suited to the solemn commonplaces of his descriptions than his previous work and is indeed more readable. Geffray Mynshul very barely approached the pathetic intent of his Essayes and Characters of a Prison and Prisoners. Mynshul's Essayes and Characters of a Prison and Prisoners attempted to use the character and the essay for rendering personal experience—in his case, incarceration in the King's Bench Prison in Southward. Stephens achieves some of his witty intent when he writes from his experience as a resident of Lincoln's Inn. Stephens's book, Satyrical Essayes, contained forty-three characters.
