Microcosmography

Seventy-eight portraits of English types drawn in 1628: a plain country fellow, a she-precise hypocrite, a young raw preacher, a downright scholar, a tavern. John Earle was a young Oxford don when he wrote them and later a bishop; the book circulated anonymously and made his name. Each character is a paragraph long and cuts exactly as deep as it needs to. Fifty-nine plates after Hogarth and Gainsborough extend Earle's gallery of types into the satirical prints and portraits of eighteenth-century England.