Characters of Virtues and Vices

…a book of characters, with Characters of Vertues and Vices (1608). As a moral philosopher he achieved a European reputation for his Christianization of Stoicism.

…first by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628). Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre were