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JOHN EARLE (c. 16o1-1665)

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Originally appearing in Volume V08, Page 796 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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JOHN EARLE (c. 16o1-1665)  ,
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English divine, was born at York about 16o1 . He matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, but migrated to Merton, where he obtained a fellowship . In 1631 he was proctor and also
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chaplain to Philip,
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earl of Pembroke, then chancellor of the university, who presented him to the rectory of Bishopston in Wiltshire . His fame spread, and in 1641 he was appointed chaplain and tutor to Prince Charles . In 1643 he was elected one of the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, but his sympathies with the king and with the
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Anglican Church were so strong that he declined to sit . Early in 1643 he was chosen chancellor of the
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cathedral of Salisbury, but of this preferment he was soon deprived as a " malignant." After Cromwell's
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great victory at Worcester, Earle went abroad, and was named clerk of the closet and chaplain to Charles II . He spent a
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year at Antwerp in the house of Isaac Walton's friend, George Morley, who afterwards became bishop of Winchester . He next joined the duke of York (James II.) at Paris, returning to England at the Restoration . He was at once appointed dean of Westminster, and in 1661 was one of the commissioners for revising the liturgy . He was on friendly terms with Richard Baxter . In November 1662 he was consecrated bishop of Worcester, and was translated, ten months later, to the see of Salisbury, where he conciliated the nonconformists . He was strongly opposed to the Conventicle and Five Mile Acts .

During the great

plague Earle attended the king and queen at Oxford, and there he died on the 17th of November 1665 . Earle's chief title to remembrance is his witty and humorous
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work entitled Microcosmographie, or a Peece of the
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World discovered, in Essayes and Characters, which throws
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light on the manners of the time . First published anonymously in 1628, it became very popular, and ran through ten
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editions in the lifetime of the author . The style is quaint and epigrammatic; and the reader is frequently reminded of Thomas Fuller by such passages as this: " A university dunner is a gentlemen follower cheaply
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purchased, for his own
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money has hyr'd him." Several reprints of the
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book have been issued since the author's
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death; and in 1671 a French
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translation by J . Dymock appeared with the title of Le
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Vice ridicule . Earle was employed by Charles II. to make the Latin translation of the Eikon Basilike, published in 1649 . A similar translation of R . Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity was accidentally destroyed . " Dr Earle," says Lord Clarendon in his
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Life, " was a man of great piety and devotion, a most eloquent and powerful preacher, and of a conversation so pleasant and delightful, so very innocent, and so very facetious, that no man's
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company was more desired and loved . No man was more negligent in his dress and habit and mien, no man more wary and cultivated in his behaviour and discourse . He was very dear to the Lord Falkland, with whom he spent as much time as he could make his own." See especially Philip Bliss's edition of the Microcosmographie (
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London, 1811), and E . Arber's Reprint (London, 1868) .

End of Article: JOHN EARLE (c. 16o1-1665)
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