ABSTRACT
When John Earle cast his work, he effected a synthesis of the most notable efforts in the character tradition. Irony is a tern often applied to Earle's characters, for it is the skilled use of this element in his work that separates him from the other character-writers. In the Micro-cosmographie irony implies a sympathetic awareness of the basic disparity "between a man's actions and his motives, expressed without stridency or tendentiousness. The graphic description of the objects of the antiquary's search is Earle's method of showing their utter foolishness and uselessness; a broken statue, a ruined abbey, the rust of old monuments, shekels and Roman coins, the moth-eaten cover of an old manuscript. Earle's own style has a neoclassical balance and harmony more typically Augustan than should be thought likely in 1628.
