The seventeenth century perfected the literary ‘character’, a concentrated portrait of a person’s nature and conduct. David Nichol Smith gathers the best from histories and memoirs: Clarendon on Buckingham, Strafford, Charles I and Ben Jonson, Ben Jonson and Fuller on Bacon, Weldon and Wilson on James I, with an essay on the form’s origins.
A rich gallery of Stuart England in its own vivid prose, for readers of history and biography. Download the free EPUB.