[In this essay, Tourney surveys Hall's polemical writings in the period between the satires of his early career and his later tracts on ecclesiastical policy. Discussing Heaven Upon Earth, Characters of Vertues and Vices, Epistles and Resolutions and Decisions of Divers Practical Cases of Conscience, Tourney finds Hall to be in the mainstream of moral philosophy for his time.]

Established at Hawstead, Hall turned moralist, a role for which he was well prepared by education and temperament. Yet his decision to give up the flail for the ferule was neither sudden nor radical. The satirist is always a moralist after a fashion; his business, too, is the critique of values, and although his methods are crude and caustic he shares the moralist's concern for the ethical betterment of his race. The truth is that Hall had long brooded on the foibles and follies of men, and he was now ready to lead them to better ways in literary forms more congenial with his priestly vocation and more apt to gain the attention of persons in high places. Genuinely devout and concerned for the spiritual welfare of his countrymen, he was nonetheless also ambitious. He wanted to rise in the ecclesiastical order, and he knew that to do so he would have to become known beyond the grounds of his parish church. His satires had been directed largely at other university men who could appreciate his classical imitation and academic wit; his new audience would be a broader public, including kings as well as tradesmen, hungry, Hall sincerely believed, for moral instruction. Always conscious that his literary talents were gifts of God, he was anxious to put them to good use.

I. HEAVEN UPON EARTH

Hall's moral philosophy is best expressed in his Heaven Upon Earth, a little book published first in 1606, with second and third editions in 1607 and 1609. In his dedication to the Earl of Huntingdon, Hall declares his purpose is “to teach men how to be happy in this life,” an aim he was confident he had achieved despite the brevity of his book and the elusiveness of its theme. Hall, as it turned out, had no new formula for happiness; most of his ideas he had got from his reading of classical moralists, St. Augustine, and the Scriptures. But the book is a useful introduction to Hall's moral philosophy and to his prose style; and after the obscurity of the satires it is refreshing to turn to something Hall was at pains to make clear.

Heaven Upon Earth is divided into twenty-seven sections and has a diagrammatic orderliness typical of many learned treatises of the time.¹ The contents of the book may be quickly summarized. Hall begins by defining tranquillity as an emotional equilibrium impervious to depression or lightheartedness but “hanging equal and unmoved betwixt.” Finding obstacles to tranquillity in guilt and fear, he methodically analyzes the causes, degrees, and remedies of each, concluding that repentance, faith, and control of the passions will reconcile man to God and to himself and that the anticipation, acceptance, and appreciation of “crosses” (i.e. misfortune) will mitigate the torment of real and imagined fears. He surveys false values such as riches, honors, and pleasures, noting the vanity of each and furnishing historical examples of men caught in such snares, and provides positive rules for peace of mind, enjoins obedience and prayer, and urges the acceptance of one's lot in life.

In composing his treatise, Hall followed Seneca, whose De Tranquillitate Animi dealt with the same theme and whose definition of happiness Hall borrowed.² The leader of the so-called middle Stoa or Roman School of Stoicism, Seneca had believed in the existence of a god and the soul, had preached the control of the passions and the importance of duty, and, although a heathen, had developed doctrines industrious Christian divines might accommodate to Christian theology, as the Belgian scholar Justus Lipsius had done in attempting to reconcile Stoic determinism with divine providence. In antiquity, Seneca had been praised by Lactantius, St. Jerome, and Tertullian as “our Seneca,” and like Cicero had been all but incorporated into the Christian pantheon.³ Hall's contemporaries held Seneca in hardly less esteem. Although Thomas Lodge's translation of Seneca's moral discourses was not published until 1614, Seneca's nondramatic writing had been read, quoted copiously, and venerated in the Latin original by several generations of Humanist scholars and educated gentlemen.⁴ The enormous influence of Seneca's tragedies on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama need not be mentioned.

Hall has been called the “English Seneca” or “Christian Seneca,”⁵ usually with the implication that his debt was in principle as well as style; but it is easy to misconstrue Hall's “Senecanism” even though he himself was at great pains to define it. The severity of the Stoic code naturally appealed to Hall, a man of austere personal habits. But although Hall praised the Stoic philosophers and Seneca in particular (“never any heathen wrote more divinely, never any philosopher more probably”), his intention was to supersede those classical moralists whom he admired for their wisdom but whose precepts he believed were limited by their dependence on natural reason. The opening paragraph of Heaven Upon Earth makes this point clearly:

When I had studiously read over the moral writings of some wise heathen, especially those of the Stoical profession, I must confess I found a little envy and pity striving together within me: I envied Nature in them, to see her so witty in devising such plausible refuges for doubting and troubled minds: I pitied them, to see that their careful disquisition of true rest led them, in the end, but to mere unquietness. Wherein, methought, they were as hounds swift of foot, but not exquisite in scent; which in a hasty pursuit take a wrong way, spending their mouths and courses in vain. Their praise of guessing wittily they shall not lose; their hopes, both they lost and whosoever follows them.

(VI, 3)⁶

To Hall, the heathen philosopher might approximate truth, but never fully grasp it, nor could Stoic resignation ever provide a true remedy for the ills of fortune: “Not Athens must teach this lesson, but Jerusalem.”

Hall's treatise is, then, in many ways more a critique of Stoic philosophy (indeed, of reason without revelation) than an endorsement. Hall summarizes Seneca's remedies for an unquiet mind only to show them insufficient and uses illustrations of heathen fortitude to prove it futile. We hear echoes of Stoicism in Hall's insistence that to anticipate pain is to mitigate it, in his disparagement of honors and riches, and in his conviction of the inconstancy and unreliability of earthly things; but such ideas are as much Christian as Stoic. Although like Seneca, Hall was concerned as to how a man might live happily in a world of flux, his “positive rules” for tranquillity assumed a divine providence and the saving principle of faith. Friendship, business affairs, public service—the means Seneca counseled to avoid depression—were to Hall merely a part of the passing scene. We live here “in an ocean of troubles, wherein we can see no firm land.” Man's only resort is above:

All earthly things are full of variableness, and therefore, having no stay in themselves can give none to us. He that will have and hold right tranquillity must find in himself a sweet fruition of God, and a feeling apprehension of his presence; that when he finds manifold occasions of vexation in these earthly things, he, overlooking them all, and having recourse to his Comforter, may find in Him such matter of contentment, that he may pass over all these petty grievances with contempt; which whosoever wants may be secure, cannot be quiet.

(VI, 32)

Hall's reliance on Christian theology is clearly seen in his discussion of the unquiet conscience. Here, Hall takes the reader step by step from the recognition of sin to the realization that there can be no peace without reconciliation, no reconciliation without remission, and no remission with satisfaction, to a meditation on, and celebration of, Christ's redeeming act. Hall's is thus a dark vision of the world—like Seneca's a vision of impending and unavoidable troubles—but it is one that foresees salvation, not dependent as in Stoicism on personal resolution and fortitude, but on the Christian virtues of humility, patience, and faith.

Significantly, Hall was also eager to reject Stoic apathy. Seneca preached salvation in indifference, allowing even suicide in cases of extreme hardship, pain, or disgrace. Finding the world uncertain and mysterious he held misfortune inevitable and encouraged the wise man to ignore it. This characteristically Stoic attitude drew heavy fire in the seventeenth century from Christian divines who insisted that although Christianity and Stoicism shared a contempt for the world, they could not share a disregard for the evil that invited God's providence.⁷ The Christian, they argued, must respond positively to suffering, with gratitude and even cheerfulness. Accordingly, Hall declared, “Crosses, unjustly termed evils, as they are sent of him that is all goodness; so they are sent for good, and his end cannot be frustrate.” To Hall, Seneca mistook the point of suffering in urging that it be ignored, for from the “crosses” of life the Christian perceives the malady of the soul and the terms of the human condition.

Hall's view of death is yet another indication of his variance from Stoicism. Seneca had dealt with the fear of death in several of his moral epistles. In On Despising Death, for example, he gave instances of famous persons who had faced death unafraid, who had “despised that moment when the soul breathes its last.”⁸ Hall, on the other hand, dwells on the horrors of death to show them no illusion but a horrible reality and extends the anguish of dying into the eternal world. “If our momentary sufferings seem long, how long shall that be that is eternal.” He also cites examples, not of heroic indifference but of awful suffering, and the prospect he holds out for relief from terror is not resignation to the inevitable but the prospect of heaven. “The Epicure or Sadduccee dare not die, for fear of not being; the guilty and the loose worldling dares not die, because he knows not whether he shall be miserable or not be at all; the resolved Christian dares and would die, because he knows he shall be happy.”

Although full of doctrine, Heaven Upon Earth is not dull reading, and it is easy to see why it might have been popular. Hall is variously ironic, witty, and dramatic—he shows flashes of humor, despite the overall somberness of his world view, although his humor is of a sardonic sort. We are often reminded, in reading the treatise, of Hall the satirist, for to Hall it is not enough that the recalcitrant worldling be proven wrong; he must also be shown absurd. “The drunken man is as thirsty as the sweating traveller,” he observes. “The man of nice education hath a feeble stomach, and, rasping since his last meal, doubts whether he should eat of his best dish or nothing.” Homely adages such as these—the exempla of Hall's precepts—anticipate the categorization and neatly filed sententiae of his Characters:

The mind of man cannot want some refuge; and, as we say of the elephant, cannot rest, unless it have something to lean upon. The covetous man, whose heaven is his chest, when he hears himself rated and cursed for oppressions, comes home, and seeing his bags safe, applauds himself against all censures. The glutton, when he loseth friends or good name, yet joyeth in his well furnished table and the laughter of his wine; more pleasing himself in one dish than he can be grieved with all the world's miscarriage. The needy scholar, whose wealth lies all in his brain, cheers himself against iniquity of times with the conceit of his knowledge.

(VI, 32-3)

A dissonance for the modern reader is Hall's persistent note of self-congratulation. He is very sure of his doctrine, and of himself, contemptuous of those outside the pale of his orthodoxy. Charity moves him to write, and yet sharing Seneca's view that the world is full of fools, he treats his readers as potential adversaries. While he is willing to warn the wordly-minded of their sinful ways, like Jonah he is a somewhat reluctant prophet. Let the Devil take his own, he seems to say, concluding the treatise with an invitation to the hard of heart to persist in their vanities.

II. CHARACTERS

The best known of Hall's moral writings are his Characters of Vertues and Vices (1608), twenty-four prose essays modeled on the Ethical Characters of Theophrastus. There were English precedents for character writing in the personified seven deadly sins of medieval allegory and in the thumbnail sketch of moral and social types often found in the Elizabethan sermon and pamphlet, but a book composed wholly of such portraiture was a novelty in seventeenth-century England.⁹

Although Hall thought his Characters original, he believed “charactery” to be a traditional art. In a preface to the volume—“A Premonition of the Title and Use of Characters”—he identified himself with that class of moral philosopher who of old combined precept and example in “speaking pictures, or lively images.” By such means, Hall explained, “the ruder multitude might, even by their sense, learn to know virtue, and to discern what to detest.” In “charactery” Hall believed he had found a mode of instruction that might, without exhortation or dissuasion, heighten the moral awareness of his readers.

In composing characters, Hall followed an “ancient master of morality,” the Greek philosopher Theophrastus, whose Ethical Characters consisted of thirty-two sketches of social “types.” The Theophrastan characters were satirical in tone, and although presented as moral instruction in a preface (almost surely by another hand in a later age), they seem designed largely to amuse. Hall broadened the scope and altered the emphasis of his model by characterizing virtue as well as vice and by infusing his characters with his own particular moral bias: the Christian Stoicism of his Heaven Upon Earth. He also gave the character a more definite form. The Theophrastan sketch began with a definition and concluded with a series of illustrative vignettes, all within the compass of a few hundred words. Hall's characters are more fully developed, begin with a definition of a moral quality or description of its possessor, proceed to lower levels of generality through a combination of vignette and sententiae, and conclude, emphatically, with a volley of terse epithets.

Hall's Characters exemplify a severe moral typology. When he tells us in his “proem” to Book I that “virtue is not loved, because she is not seen; and vice loseth much detestation, because her ugliness is a secret,” he is telling us both that experience is illusory and moral reality simple. There is virtue and there is vice. Within that conceptual frame, all morality is comprehended. The key to recognition is the eye, for Hall shared Plato's notion that morals and aesthetics were related. If we fail to see Vice for what it is, our misunderstanding does not make Vice a Virtue. We, rather, are “blind and bewitched” by the world, which conceals the beauty of virtue and the foulness of vice.

Although behind this construct is the traditionally Christian dualism of good vs. evil, there is also Hall's training as a rhetorician. Praise and blame—long identified with virtue and vice—were central motives in the academic exercises of his time. George Puttenham in his Arte of English Poesie had placed the “character” among epideictic types, the discourse of praise and blame.¹⁰ Hall's moral taxonomy also suggests the dichotomizing tendency of Ramist logic. Hall's two-part division of morals was thus compatible with both the traditional dualism of Christian ethics and one of the more fashionable intellectual perspectives of his time.

In his Characters of Vertues Hall treats eleven qualities: Wisdom, Honesty, Faithfulness, Humility, Valiancy, Patience, True Friendship, True Nobility, Justice, Penitence, and Happiness. His treatment of each represents a conflation of classical and Christian moral ideals: his Faithful Man, Humble Man, and Penitent obviously owe much to the theology and imagery of St. Paul; the Valiant Man, the Truly Noble and the True Friend reveal his classical reading. Dominant throughout are the Stoic themes of self-knowledge, self-control and self-sufficiency. In all his Characters, however, Hall strives to make something of Christian piety. As a consequence, even Hall's Wise Man, whom Hall represents as a skilled logician—“his working mind doth nothing all his time but make syllogisms and draw out conclusions”—seeks first the state of his soul, and his Truly Noble “is more careful to give true honor to his Maker, than to receive civil honour from men.” It may therefore be said that although some of Hall's virtues are those of a virtuous heathen, all are the proper goal of good Christians.

Hall's character of the Wise Man may serve further as an example of Hall's intellectual ideals as well as his practical bent. Although like Bacon, Hall's Wise Man takes all knowledge for his province (“There is nothing that he desires not to know”), that knowledge he desires most is of the self, which he attains by close observation of men and things, a turning of observation to precept and precept to practice. Thus, the end of his wisdom is not to speak but to act and to learn before himself presuming to teach others. Hall's Wise Man is chiefly an observer rather than a reader, although that he is the latter as well is implied in Hall's insistence that the Wise Man can understand the present and predict the future because he knows the past. He minds his own business, is an excellent teacher, and his wisdom manifests itself in his self-control (“His passions are so many good servants, which stand in a diligent attendance, ready to be commanded by reason, by religion”), and in his steadfastness. For although he is marvelously alert to the passing scene, he remains aloof from it. “He stands like a centre, unmoved, while the circumference of his estate is drawn above, beneath, about him.” Significantly Hall's Wise Man is very much in this world, even if he may not be of it; for although wisdom for Hall begins in a logical operation, its proof is in knowing how to deploy one's energies for the greatest good of the self and others.

Of Hall's “virtues,” only one is represented by a social role: The Good Magistrate. Here Hall's intent seems not to have been the mere personification of Justice, but an outline of the moral obligations of the Elizabethan civil servant, who was in his office both judge and administrator. The provenance of Hall's ideas in this character is the Elizabethan political commonplace, which viewed magistracy as a pivotal link in that “great chain of being” extending from God above to the beasts below.¹¹ Yet although Hall goes so far as to call the Magistrate “another God on earth,” he is careful to emphasize the social responsibilities of the Good Magistrate. “His nights, his meals are short and interrupted; all which he bears well, because he knows himself made for a public servant of peace and justice. … On the bench he is another from himself at home; now all private respects, of blood, alliance, amity, are forgotten.” For Hall, the magistrate's office requires an even stricter code than that exacted from the ordinary Christian: “Pity, the best praise of Humanity and the fruit of Christian love,” is checked. A rugged forehead and severe countenance become standard equipment in the war against vice and villainy.

Hall's Happy Man was one of two characters added to the edition of 1615, probably to round out his gallery of virtues with the depiction of a man possessing them all, for although Hall's “happiness” is more virtue rewarded than a virtue itself, the character comes closest to describing Hall's ideal: the perfect integration of Stoic and Christian virtues. It is easy, however, to overestimate the Stoic influence in this character. The Happy Man knows himself, is indifferent to poverty or wealth, “lives quietly at home, out of the noise of the world; and loves to enjoy himself always; and sometimes his friends; and hath as full scope to his thoughts as to his eyes.” He has a healthy mind in a healthy body, an even temper, and an independent spirit. All might have been drawn from Seneca's De Tranquillitate alone, had Hall not so completely absorbed the Stoic ethic making that kind of imitation unnecessary. But Hall's Happy Man is his whole moral philosophy in microcosm. Senecan integrity secures peace in this life, but what of the world to come? In this character, the Happy Man's Christian devotion is placed climactically to suggest both its indispensability and its superiority to the virtues of Stoic morality. For Hall, the most perfect happiness of the Happy Man lies in the illumination and exaltation of mystical experience:

His soul is every day dilated to receive that God in whom he is; and hath attained to love himself for God, and God for his own sake. His eyes stick so fast in heaven, that no earthly object can remove them: yea, his whole self is there before his time; and sees with Stephen, and hears with Paul, and enjoys with Lazarus, the glory that he shall have; and takes possession beforehand of his room amongst the saints. And these heavenly contentments have so taken him up, that now he looks down displeasedly upon the earth, as the region of his sorrow and banishment.

(VI, 105)

There are more characters of Vice than of Virtue, perhaps because Hall thought Vice capable of more variety. In any case, in his “vices” Hall followed Theophrastus in featuring social types. Some, like the Busy-Body, the Superstitious, and the Malcontent have Theophrastan counterparts which may have suggested some details in Hall's portraits. In all, however, Hall's debt to Theophrastus has been overstated. It is the vice of scholars to think every correspondence a debt and to demand of every observation its “source.” Hall, however, did not need to read Theophrastus to know ambition, flattery, laziness, or vainglory when he saw them. As a keen observer of men, a frequenter of court and town, he was aware of the vagaries of human nature.

Unlike Theophrastus, whose portraiture is genial satire, Hall saw vice as a deformity; and his vices personified are all social misfits, inimical to the best interests of themselves and their neighbors and hostile to reason and religion. Wisdom leads Hall's virtues because she presupposes them all; similarly, Hall places Hypocrisy first among the evils because “she cometh nearest to virtue and is the worst of vices.” Busy-Body follows the Hypocrite, perhaps because he hides his nosiness under a “pretense of love” and is therefore a hypocrite of a lesser order. The Superstitious and the Profane are in sequence to contrast the credulity of one with the atheism of the other. Elsewhere, Hall's arrangement seems random, and there is no clear effort to provide among the “vices” direct counterparts for Hall's “virtues.” What Hall did intend was that the reader mark the contrast between the two books of the Characters: life lived according to reason and religion as opposed to life lived sinfully and foolishly. That Hall planned so to structure the reader's experience of the Characters is suggested in his “Proem” to Book II:

I have showed you many fair virtues. I speak not for them: if their sight cannot command affection, let them lose it. They shall please yet better after you have troubled your eyes a little with the view of deformities; and by how much more they please, so much more odious and like themselves shall these deformities appear. This light contraries gives to each other in the midst of their enmity, that one makes the other seem more good or ill.

(VI, 106)

Hall's Characters has been called static and colorless,¹² and there is some justification for this criticism in the Characters of Vertues where Hall's theme obliged him to follow a decorum of high seriousness. All this changes in Hall's “vices,” however. In his “Proem” to Book II he further observes that his portraits of vice might “seem less grave, more satirical,” a shift in tone he attributed to the fact that some “evils are, besides the odiousness, ridiculous.”

A main strategy in Hall's Characters of Vices is the satirical vignette: the miniature drama in which a vice manifests itself in the social behavior of its possessor. An example is this scene from Hall's Hypocrite:

Walking early up into the city, he turns into the great church, and salutes one of the pillars on one knee; worshipping that God, which at home he cares not for: while his eye is fixed on some window, on some passenger; and his heart knows not whither his lips go: he rises, and, looking about with admiration, complains of our frozen charity; commends the ancient. At church he will ever sit where he may be seen best; and in the midst of the sermon pulls out his tables in haste, as if he feared to lose that note; when he writes, either his forgotten errand, or nothing: then he turns his Bible with a noise to seek an omitted quotation; and folds the leaf, as if he had found it; and asks aloud the name of the preacher, and repeats it; whom he publicly salutes, thanks, praises, invites, entertains with tedious good counsel, with good discourse, if it had come from an honester mouth.

(VI, 107)

Here Hall captures hypocrisy in a bit of droll comedy he must have seen enacted a dozen times both in St. Paul's, London, and in his own parish church. The concrete detail, the careful limning of the Hypocrite's calculated postures, gives the vignette a psychological authenticity as well as a humorous effect.

Similar qualities are evident in this scene from the Busy-Body:

If he see but two men talk, and read a letter in the street, he runs to them, and asks if he may not be partner of that secret relation; and if they deny it, he offers to tell, since he may not hear, wonders: and then falls upon the report of the Scottish mine, or the great fish taken up at Lynn, or of the freezing of the Thames and, after many thanks and dismissions, is hardly entreated silence.

(VI, 108)

It is Hall's sense of the ridiculous that for modern readers saves his “vices” from the colorlessness of his “virtues.” In his character of the Superstitious, for example, Hall successfully recreates the whole psychological ambience of the man who feels himself constantly vulnerable to supernatural menace:

This man dares not stir forth till his breast be crossed and his face sprinkled. If but an hare cross him in the way, he returns; or if his journey began, unawares, on the dismal day; or, if he stumbled at the threshold. If he see a snake unkilled, he fears mischief; if the salt fall toward him, he looks pale and red, and is not quiet till one of the waiters have poured wine on his lap; and when he sneezeth, thinks them not his friends that uncover not.

(VI, 109)

Equally comic and satiric are Hall's descriptions of the Covetous Man returning to his cottage enraged to know “what became of the loose crust in his cupboard, and who hath rioted amongst his leeks.” Or the account of the fantastic posturing of the courtier (The Vainglorious), who pretends to have letters, actually composed by himself, from persons of high station inviting him to dine.

What Hall's “vices” provide is the feel of life, a mis-en-scène of concrete details, gestures, topical allusions, folklore and motives which are, though base, cruel, or ridiculous, thoroughly human and perennial. We have almost returned to the world of Hall's satires, with its leering faces, crowded streets, and atmosphere of moral decay. Not to be overlooked is Hall's ability to capture the essence of folly in a trenchant phrase. Of the Malcontent he observes with mock sonority, “In the deep silence of the night, the very moonshine openeth his clamorous mouth.” He finds the Flatterer's whole design to “make men fools in teaching them to overvalue themselves and to tickle his friends to death.” The Unconstant Man is a “guest in his own house”; the Vainglorious, “A Spanish soldier on an Italian theatre”; the Envious, “a lean and pale carcass quickened with a fiend.” And he concludes of the Hypocrite that he is “a rotten stick in the dark night,” and affirms the Slothful “witty in nothing but framing excuses to sit still.”

Posthumously, Sir Thomas Overbury paid Hall the compliment of imitation in 1614 in the second printing of a poem, A Wife, to which were added twenty-one characters by Overbury and other hands, including John Webster and John Donne. These “Characters,” following Hall's in form but without his moral purpose, emphasize realistic background and coarse comic detail. Nicholas Breton published his Characters Upon Essays Moral and Divine the year following but treated qualities or states without personifying them. Breton's Characters shows the relationship of character-writing to the still nascent essay form. The last significant collection of the period was that of John Earle, whose Microcosmography contained over fifty sketches in the first edition of genial and philosophical portraiture, like the Overburian characters, without strong didactic emphasis. As Boyce suggests, while Hall pioneered the form, the Overburians set the example for content in later character writers.¹³ Yet Hall's Characters has always had readers and admirers. His was one of the first—if not the first—English books to be translated into French, and from the French it was translated into German at least four times during the seventeenth century.¹⁴

III. EPISTLES

As a letter writer, Hall had his English predecessors, despite his claim in the preface to Epistles (3 vols., 1608-11) that they represented a “new fashion of discourse, new to our language.” William Fulwood and Abraham Fleming had published “epistles” in 1568 and 1576, respectively; and Angel Day's The English Secretorie informed Elizabethans concerning the form and proper matter of “epistles and familiar letters” as early as 1586. But the letters of Fulwood and Fleming were largely translations from classical authors; and Day's Secretorie, while containing some sample epistles, was finally only a handbook based on classical rhetoric. Hall's Epistles were the first English letters to stand comparison with those of the Latin masters, Cicero, Pliny, and Seneca.

Hall's epistles were arranged in six “decades” or units of ten letters each and addressed to friends, patrons, and lords and ladies of the court of Prince Henry, whom Hall served as chaplain until the Prince's death in 1612. They provide a glimpse, therefore, of the life of the age, at least as perceived by a cleric of austere personal habits and moralizing temper. Although the epistles are undated, allusions to events private and public suggest many were no sooner composed than sent off to the printer. Most seem to have been actual correspondence; all were obviously written or revised with an eye to publication.

Renaissance guides to letter writing usually treated the epistle as a kind of oration.¹⁵ Hall thought it, rather, a colloquial and familiar form in which “we do but talk with our friends by our pen and express ourselves no whit less easily, somewhat more digestedly.” But while Hall's epistles are not orations, neither are they “familiar” in our modern sense. They contain little news, the idiom is formal, and each is titled and tightly organized around a theme.

In his conception of epistolary style Hall followed Erasmus, Lipsius, and the example of Seneca, whose Epistulae Morales were much prized by English Humanists and whose epistles, as Bacon had observed, were really little essays. Erasmus in his Modus Conscribiendi Epistolis defined the epistle as a conversation between absent friends, a definition Angel Day borrowed in his English Secretorie. Lipsius, chief Renaissance expositor of Seneca, defined the qualities of the epistle as brevity, perspicuity, simplicity, charm (venustas), and propriety (decencia), principles to which Hall adhered in his view that the epistle should be “more free, more familiar” and in his belief that brevity made instruction more memorable:

I grant that brevity, where it is neither obscure not defective, is very pleasing, even to the daintiest judgments. No marvel, therefore, if most men desire much good counsel in a narrow room; as some affect to have great personages drawn in little tablets; or, as we see worlds of countries described in the compass of small maps. Neither do I unwillingly yield to follow them: for both the powers of good advice are the stronger when they are thus united; and brevity makes counsel more portable for memory, and readier for use.

(VI, 311)

Some of Hall's themes are Senecan, and his epistles follow a format similar to that of the Roman moralist's: an initial allusion to a specific event in Hall or his correspondent's life, then general reflection on some moral issue, expressed tersely and impersonally in sententiae and proverb. As usual, however, Hall's imitation is far from slavish.

Although arranged randomly, Hall's epistles tend to be of three sorts: moral, doctrinal, or polemical. Epistles of the first category treat commonplace Renaissance themes with arguments Hall had from his reading of classical authors. They exhort, commend, console; but the degree to which the nominal correspondent shapes Hall's manner or matter varies from letter to letter. Some of the moral epistles deal with traditional subjects. The letters to Lord Hay (“Of True Honor”), Matthew Milward (“On the Pleasure of Study and Contemplation”), and Sir Andrew Asteley (“On our due Preparation for Death”) make little or no reference to the addressee and might properly have been sent to anyone. “On the Benefit of retirement and secrecy,” composed for Sir Edmund Bacon, Hall's former patron and traveling companion, is warm and congratulatory, but while making specific allusions to Bacon's career and private habits, includes much in the oracular manner of Sir Francis Bacon's essays:

For great places have seldom safe and easy entrances; and, which is worse, great charges can hardly be plausibly wielded without some indirect policies. Alas! their privileges cannot countervail their toil. Weary days and restless nights, short lives and long cares, weak bodies and unquiet minds, attend lightly on greatness: either clients break their sleep in the morning, or the intention of their mind drives it off from the first watch: either suits or complaints thrust themselves into their recreations, and packets of letters interrupt their meals: it is ever term with them, without vacation: their businesses admit no night, no holiday.

(VI, 160)

It was the moral content of his epistles that relieved Hall from the charge of vanity in publishing his correspondence. Convinced that instruction was a kind of pleasure, he did not fail to please in the way suited to his learning, temperament, and priestly vocation. But not all the moral epistles are tissues of commonplaces. In letters of consolation, for example, he often shows a logical rigor and ingenuity of the kind John Donne had made fashionable in his funeral verses. To “J. B.” (“Against the Fear of Death”), Hall demonstrates the unreasonableness of fearing death by showing that it is a necessary adjunct of life:¹⁶ “Think, that death is necessarily annexed to nature. We are for a time on condition that we shall not be; we receive life but upon terms of redelivery. Necessity makes some things easy, as it usually makes easy things difficult. It is a fond injustice to embrace the covenant and shrink at the condition” (VI, 157). To “W. R.” (“Consolations of Immoderate grief for the death of friends”), Hall consoles the bereaved husband and father with a witty justification of grief:

You had but two jewels, which you held precious; a wife and a son: one was yourself divided; the other, yourself multiplied: you have lost both, and well-near at once. The loss of one caused the loss of the other, and both of them your just grief. Such losses, when they come single, afflict us; but when double, astonish us: and though they give advantage of respite, would almost overwhelm the best patient.

(VI, 180)

And in his epistle to I. A. Merchant (“Against Sorrow for Worldly losses”) he argues for the blessings “of a mean estate” in such a way as to suggest that he had forgotten nothing of his early training as a rhetorician:

The fear of some evils is worse than the sense. To speak ingenuously; I could never see wherein poverty deserved so hard a conceit. It takes away the delicacy of fare, softness of lodging, gayness of attire; and, perhaps, brings with it contempt: this is the worst, and all. View it now on the better side: lo there, quiet security, sound sleeps, sharp appetite, free merriment; no fears, no cares, no suspicion, no distempers of excess, no discontentment. If I were judge, my tongue should be unjust if poverty went away weeping. I cannot see how the evils it brings can compare with those which it removes; how the discommodities should match the blessings of the mean estate.

(VI, 183-4)

Most of Hall's letters are either doctrinal or polemic. They treat the moral requirements of the Christian life, resolve sticky ethical questions, or assail his religious opponents. The letters enjoining Christian piety (e.g. To Mr. Robert Hay, “Of the continual exercise of a Christian; how he may keep his heart from hardness and his ways from error”) are bland sermons, full of good counsel tersely expressed. The casuistical pieces are more interesting, not because moderns share Hall's views on divorce, adultery, sexual abstinence among husband and wife, or commerce between Christian and infidel, but because Hall's deliberations suggest what a learned man of his age might consider morally lawful. The polemical epistles are much in the fashion of the time: bold, rancorous, conceited. Hall's epistles “On the marriage of ecclesiastical persons” is a miniature thesis defending the clergy's right to marry. A letter to Sir David Murray is a cynical analysis of Roman “miracles,” in which Hall concludes that “all popish miracles are either falsely reported, or falsely done, or falsely miraculous, or falsely ascribed to Heaven” (VI, 148). Of special interest is Hall's epistle to John Smith and John Robinson, leaders of the Separatists and founders of the Plymouth Colony. Hall's epistle is censorious, and he has been criticized by one biographer for his presumption in attacking the founders of a great nation.¹⁷ But while it is true that Hall minces few words in dealing with the Separatists—“in setting forth their injury done to the Church, the injustice of their cause, and fearfulness of their offence,” Hall would have condemned the self-imposed exile of the Pilgrim fathers even had he forseen its consequences. Hall feared and hated nothing more than schism. It was hostile to his own accommodating and compromising nature and incompatible with that “middle ground” on which he felt the English Reformed Church to be justly situated. To Hall, the Separatists were guilty of deserting the Church and the nation in a time of need and of over-emphasizing the importance of ritual, which to Hall was “for ornament more than use; not parts of the building, but not necessary appendances.” His epistle, therefore, while avoiding personal attacks against Robinson and Smith, does not hesitate to denounce their separation as moral error, dangerous to themselves and to others in the example.

Hall's Epistles typify his moral writings. The personality of the sober churchman infuses every page, reflecting his reverence for order, tradition, and inherited wisdom. A few of the epistles provide glimpses into Hall's private life, his travels, and his daily routine of study, meditation, and ministry. But even these allusions are made to do service as exempla, and most of the epistles express what was often (in Hall's age) thought but never previously expressed with so admirable a terseness and polish. Moderns suffocating in Hall's moral earnestness may wonder why Hall thought his epistles entertaining as well as instructive. The answer, of course, is that Hall's age did find instruction entertaining, tradition comforting, eloquence trustworthy. Hall's moral writings were popular, as their frequent editions suggest, and they earned Hall respect both as an author and as a man. Like his satires and characters, the Epistles became a model for later writers, who handled the form with more wit but perhaps less moral earnestness. For all the inadequacies of Hall's letters, they justify his status as a pioneer in English literature.

IV. CASES OF CONSCIENCE

To Hall, the most useful branch of divinity was that dealing with cases of conscience; but although, as we have seen, a number of his epistles are casuistical, his chief work of this sort was Resolutions and Decisions of Divers Practical Cases of Conscience, published in 1648. This book, tendered as “probable advices for the simpler sort of Christians,” consists of four decades treating, respectively, the ethics of business, civic responsibility, religion, and matrimony. In each “case,” Hall's method is to pose a question, answer it with a general principle, and explore the issue to discover possible objections, exceptions, or qualifications. The basis of his judgment is as always Holy Scripture, and sometimes natural law, a principle he seems to have identified with what was instinctual and universal in man. The cases themselves are replete with allusions to his classical reading and to the work of contemporary Roman and Reformed casuists, but his manner is to resolve in favor of Christian charity where he found no warrant in Scripture or in nature.

Hall's views of the morality of business enterprises confirm the impression given in his verse satires that he had both a strong distaste for economic injustice and a good working knowledge of economics. He condemns usury, profiteering, unauthorized monopolies and supports price controls; but in determining business ethics he is concerned with motivation, and his governing principle is a concern for one's neighbor, noting that “in all human and civil acts of commerce it is a sure rule, that whatsoever is not a violation of charity cannot be unlawful; and whatsoever is not agreeable to charity can be no other than sinful” (VII, 274). In turning to questions of civil responsibility, Hall is careful to distinguish between the legal and moral aspects of an action, leaving the former to the jurists. It is lawful for one man to kill another in self-defense, he concludes, because self-preservation is a natural instinct; duelling, on the other hand, he condemns as wicked and damnable since it tempts God to preserve the life of the wronged party and constitutes murder by mutual consent. His opinions of suicide and abortion are what we should have supposed: the one is condemned without exception, Hall's admiration for Roman Stoicism notwithstanding; the second is condemned with but one exception, when incidental to an attempt to save both the life of the mother and the unborn child. His views on imperialism (“Whether it be lawful for Christians, where they find a country possessed by savage pagans and infidels, to drive out the native inhabitants, and to seize and enjoy their lands upon any pretence”) are more reasonable than we should have expected in an age of rampant colonizing:

Dominion and property is not founded in religion, but in natural and civil right. It is true that the saints have in Christ, the Lord of all things, a spiritual right in all creatures … but the spiritual right gives a man no title at all to any natural or civil possession here on earth. Yet, Christ himself, though both as God and as Mediator the whole world were his; yet he tells Pilate, My Kingdom is not of this World: neither did he, though the Lord paramount of this whole earth, by virtue of that transcendent sovereignty, put any man out of the possession of one foot of ground which fell to him either by birth or purchase. Neither doth the want of that spiritual interest debar any man from rightful claim and fruition of these earthly inheritances.

(VII, 349-50)

Hall's views on matrimony, dealing as they do largely with definitions of incest and occasions for divorce and annulment, are not quite as interesting as his economic and political opinions: for the most part he simply argues the Scriptural warrant behind the civil code. There is one exception, however; and that is the second case of the fourth decade, in which Hall argues the evil of divorce for any cause other than adultery and makes an unmistakable reference to John Milton's Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. Hall's quarrel with Milton will be discussed at some length in a subsequent chapter; it is enough to say here that their mutual animosity was of long standing, and nothing could have offended Bishop Hall's conservative moral philosophy more than the social radicalism of the Puritan poet:

I have heard too much of, and once saw a licentious pamphlet thrown abroad in these lawless times, in the defence and encouragement of divorces (not to be sued out; that solemnity needed not; but) to be arbitrarily given by the disliking husband to his displeasing and unquiet wife; upon this ground, principally, that marriage was instituted for the help and comfort of man: where, therefore the match proves such as that the wife doth but pull down a side, and by her innate peevishness, and either sullen or pettish and froward disposition, brings rather discomfort to her husband; the end of marriage being hereby frustrate, why should it not, saith he, be in the husband's power, after some prevailing means of reclamation attempted, to procure his own peace by casting off this clog; and to provide for his own peace and contentment in a fitter match?

Woe is me! to what a pass is the world come, that a Christian, pretending to reformation, should dare to tender so loose a project to the public! I must seriously profess, when I first did cast my eye upon the front of the book, I supposed some great wit meant to try his skill in the maintenance of this so wild and improbable paradox; but ere I could have run over some of those too well penned pages, I found the author was in earnest; and meant seriously to contribute this piece of good counsel, in way of reformation, to the wise and seasonable care of superiors.

(VII, 371)

Hall, of course, was happier than Milton in his marriage choices, but that does not begin to explain the difference in their opinions. The truth is that Hall could not consider the individual conscience and its perplexities apart from the larger polemical context; and if he was angered at Milton's impious departure from traditional Biblical teaching, he was no less offended by Roman casuists, who, as he frequently points out in Cases of Conscience, encourage license by sustaining newfangled practices of the Roman pontiff. Hall saw himself in the midst of a lawless age and called to defend divine and natural law against apostasy and vice. His Cases, therefore, while humbly tendered to the English public, were nonetheless authoritative for faithful Anglicans.

V. SENECAN STYLE

Hall came by the title of “The English Seneca” as much for his style as for his Christian Stoicism.¹⁸ His terse, symmetrical periods, “hopping short in the measure of convulsion fits,”¹⁹ as Milton complained, deserve a chapter in the history of taste as well as a prominent place in the history of English prose; for like Bacon, Hall was a leader of the anti-Ciceronian movement in the early seventeenth century.

In the sixteenth century Cicero had been the great exemplar of prose style in Latin and in vernacular tongues that aspired to Latin elegance. Schoolboys read, memorized, and “copied” him; scholars redeemed his paganism by imagining his conversion to Christianity or his correspondence with St. Paul. Indeed it is not too much to say that for the Renaissance Cicero was to eloquence what Aristotle was to wisdom: its very embodiment. The métier of Ciceronianism was the periodic sentence, swelling to a climax on waves of subordinate clauses and figures of sound. It was a style that valued copia or artful elaboration, circumlocution, and grand effects; but it was a style difficult to imitate, perhaps impossible to master, in English, although it had had by Hall's time distinguished practitioners in Roger Ascham and Richard Hooker.

The revolt against Ciceronian imitation began in the last half of the sixteenth century when Montaigne, scorning Cicero's artificiality, made the blunt, conversational manner of his Essais a part of his philosophical program.²⁰ Even more influential perhaps was the Belgian Humanist Justus Lipsius. An erstwhile Ciceronian, Lipsius in his middle years rejected the manner of the Roman orator, adopted Seneca as his guide, and established brevity as a new fashion in a series of academic discourses, epistles and in an edition of Seneca that became standard. In England, Bacon echoed the call for “Attic” plainness. Although his censure of Ciceronianism as a “delicate and polished kind of learning”²¹ was anticipated by his countrymen Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey, Bacon's reputation as a statesman and philosopher made his call for a new prose style all the more authoritative. By the end of the first decade of the seventeenth century, Senecan concinnity was well on its way to replacing Ciceronian grandeur as a model of stylistic excellence.

The distinction between Ciceronian and Senecan styles was largely the distinction anciently made between the genus grande and genus humile.²² The first was the language of oratory, valuing variety in repetition, sonority, and ornament; the second, the language of discussion or conversation, prizing brevity, wit, and plainness. As Bacon's censure implied, the distinction was of more than literary importance; for the controversy between the proponents of one genus and the other harkened back to the old quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy reflected in Plato's attack on the sophists in the Phaedrus and Gorgias. There Plato, through his mouthpieces Socrates and the Elean Stranger, had scorned the teaching of eloquence as a miseduction of youth, in that it taught them to prefer appearances to realities. Eloquence, he said, was like cosmetics or cookery—it was a knack, no true science. Later authorities, Aristotle for example, put a more favorable construction on rhetoric and on ornate style, but so-called fancy writing has always labored under the charge that it is concealing either something disreputable or nothing at all. That it concealed the latter was Bacon's argument. The example of Seneca provided him with a philosophical language, an idiom in which to express his intellectual curiosity, his skepticism, and to express his wisdom in neatly formulated utterances. Of a less critical spirit, and perhaps under the influence of Ramism which favored a plain over an ornate style,²³ Hall also chose the Stoic model as his guide.

Although there were varieties of Senecanism (Hall and Bacon do not write exactly alike), those varieties shared qualities that make it possible for us to consider them a single stylistic tendency. Most conspicuous of these is the “curt” period or sentence. Hall's sentences rarely exceed over a dozen or so words and, when longer, are generally composed of short clauses or phrases so that the effect of brevity is preserved even when the sentence exceeds the normal range. Hall is fond of colons and semicolons, abrupt transitions, milk-train rhythms and staccato effects; and like other writers of the anti-Ciceronian movement, his preference for such features occasionally leads him beyond succinctness into obscurity, although of this flaw he is much less guilty than other Senecan stylists. Another feature of Hall's sentences is their symmetry. The sententiousness that the seventeenth century admired depended not merely on memorable brevity but memorable structure, and although a plain style, Senecanism retained a number of stylistic devices to give sentences form and polish. Notable among these were isocolon (members of like length) and parison (members of like form), devices Hall used extensively to achieve balance and antithesis. In this sentence from Hall's Characters, for example, he displays his love of parallelism as well as his knack for compression: “He had rather complain than offend; and hates sin more for the indignity of it than the danger.” Here the words “complain” and “offend,” “indignity” and “danger” play off against each other, underscoring the contrast between the honest man and the extraordinary man. The double predication partially conceals the compound structure of the sentence; but the internal punctuation, like a fulcrum, rhetorically equates the balanced members. Notable here is Hall's refusal to reinforce antithesis with like sounds, a common technique of Euphuism and even of Seneca himself. Like Bacon, however, Hall rejected the jingling effect of the figures of sound, preferring parallelism only when useful to reinforce meaning.

Hall's language is plain, his vocabulary simple. Although a skilled Latinist, his diction possesses the vigor of the native idiom, and although learned, he is not ostentatiously so. Hall's writing is rich in simile and metaphor, but these are generally drawn from familiar sources, the habits of beasts, the details of alchemy and agriculture, commerce and warfare, geographic exploration and politics, the furniture of court, household and sanctuary. Preeminent are images drawn from Scripture—the heroic figures of the Patriarchs, the imagery of the Psalms, and the parables of Jesus. All these, of course, are the common property of his age; yet moderns, fresh from a reading of Andrewes or Donne, will find Hall's metaphors ordinary, even trite. There is no straining after effect in Hall. His comparisons are always clearly labeled, his meaning is always plain. Yet if rarely striking, Hall's metaphors are often remarkable for their aptness, as when in his Characters he likens the Busy-Body's tongue to the tail of Samson's foxes (VI, 108) or in the Epistles when he compares his suspicions of the sensuous as “fearing a serpent in that apple” (VI, 282).

The flaw in Hall's method is the inevitable one in any mannered style. At worst, his curt periods seem but a mechanical application of a rhetorical principle, as cultish in its own way as the Ciceronianism it rejected. It is hard, however, to accept Morris Croll's judgment that Hall's style was defective.²⁴ He was not, ultimately, a littérateur, but a teacher whose passion was moral instruction. If Hall's prose sometimes seems formulaic, it is always serviceable to his ethical program. His terse periods were easily comprehended, readily recollected. The imagery of his prose—the staples of proverb, Scripture, and everyday experience—were congenial to every Englishman's observations, and the content of his aphorisms answered to what his contemporaries felt was eternally true and universally accepted. As a style, Hall's Senecanism was flexible enough to accommodate the varied tones of his didacticism; he could exhort, satirize, compliment, and—as we shall later see—meditate in a single rhetorical idiom.

Finally, Hall's style, like the moral philosophy it expressed, shows him to be in the intellectual mainstream of his time. It was the style of the hour, and its rhetorical austerity permanently displaced Ciceronian opulence. Hall's thought too was timely. The Jacobean court with its amorous intrigues and political scandal could not answer to Hall's exacting code; but it would have recognized it and, hypocritically, applauded it. By providing “much good counsel in a narrow room,” he became, like the pagan philosopher he both admired and pitied, the moral preceptor to his generation.

Notes

1. The influence of Ramism—the doctrine of the French academic Peter Ramus (Pierre de la Ramée)—can be detected in the structure of Hall's treatise as outlined in its “Analysis of Resolution,” a one-page diagram opposite the dedicatory preface. Like Ramists in general, Hall proceeds to analyze his subject by constant subdivision. For Ramist dichotomies and the influence of Ramism in England, especially at Hall's Cambridge, see Wilber Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (Princeton, 1956), pp. 146-281, and W. J. Ong, Ramus: Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Harvard, 1958), esp. pp. 199-202.

2. “What we are seeking, therefore,” Seneca explains, “is how the mind may always pursue a steady and favourable course, may be well-disposed towards itself, and may view its condition with joy, and suffer no interruption of this joy, but may abide in a peaceful state, being never uplifted nor ever cast down. This will be ‘Tranquillity’.” Moral Essays, trans. John W. Basore (Harvard, 1958), II, 215.

3. L. D. Reynolds, The Medieval Tradition of Seneca's Letters (Oxford, 1965), pp. 112-24.

4. For a discussion of Seneca's influence on English ethical thought, see Herschel Baker, The Wars of Truth (Harvard, 1952), pp. 110-6; Ralph Graham Palmer, Seneca's De Remediis Fortuitorum and the Elizabethans (Chicago, 1953), pp. 1-25; and Basil Willey, The English Moralists (New York, 1964), pp. 66-90.

5. For discussions of Hall's “Senecanism” or “Neostoicism,” see Joseph Hall, Heaven Upon Earth and Characters of Vertues and Vices, ed. Rudolph Kirk (Rutgers, 1948), pp. 19-51; Philip A. Smith, “Bishop Hall, ‘Our English Seneca,’” Publications of the Modern Language Association, 63 (1948), 1191-1204; and Audrey Chew, “Joseph Hall and Neo-Stoicism,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, 65 (1950), 1130-45. Kirk and Smith see Hall as the leading neo-Stoic of the seventeenth century; Chew stresses Hall's essentially medieval attitude toward Seneca, noting that he “went to Seneca not for new ideas but because in Seneca he could find a reinforcement of old ones—ideas that had been current at least all through the sixteenth century” (p. 1133).

6. All quotations from Hall's prose are from The Works of the Right Reverend Joseph Hall, D.D. Bishop of Exeter and Norwich, 10 vols. (Oxford, 1863). To reduce the number of footnotes, I cite volume and page in parentheses.

7. Henry W. Sams, “Anti-Stoicism in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England,” Studies in Philology, 41 (1944), 65-78. According to Sams, Stoicism was criticized by seventeenth-century Englishmen for its apathy, paganism, and belief in the sufficiency of natural reason. Hall condemns each of these views in Heaven Upon Earth.

8. Epistulae Morales, trans. R. M. Gummere (Harvard, 1953), I, 171.

9. For the background of the English “Character,” see Edward Chauncey Baldwin, “The Relation of the English ‘Character’ to its Greek Prototype,” PMLA, 18 (1903), 412-23; Wendell Clausen, “The Beginnings of English Character-Writing in the Early Seventeenth Century,” Philological Quarterly, 25 (1946), 32-45; and Benjamin Boyce, The Theophrastan Character in England to 1642 (Harvard, 1947), pp. 3-121. As Boyce points out, Hall had written what were in essence characters in his earlier works, Mundus Alter et Idem, Meditations and Vowes (1606) and Heaven Upon Earth.

10. Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Gregory Smith (London, reprt. 1950), II, 148.

11. On this familiar Renaissance concept, see E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (New York, 1944), pp. 87-100.

12. The judgment of Clausen, p. 43, and Baldwin, “Jonson's Indebtedness to the Greek Character-Sketch,” Modern Language Notes, 16 (1901), 394. Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century 1600-1660, p. 199, is no more generous, noting that Hall “continually mingles comment and interpretation, so that his vices are not free from abstraction and his verities are almost wholly abstract.” For a favorable and thorough evaluation and interpretation, see Gerhard Müller-Schwefe, “Joseph Hall's Characters of Vertues and Vices: Notes Toward a Revaluation,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 14 (1972), 235-51.

13. Boyce, pp. 136-7.

14. Müller-Schwefe, pp. 248-51, corrects Kirk's data on Hall's foreign publication.

15. For the relationship of letter writing to rhetoric, see William G. Crane, Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance (1937; rept. Gloucester, Mass., 1964), pp. 108-112.

16. The inevitability of death was a favorite argument of Seneca in his consolatory epistles (see, Ad Marciam de consolatione, X. 6), although Hall hardly had need to report to Seneca for it. A large store of classical and Christian consolatory topoi was available to Renaissance authors; the consolatione was a common rhetorical exercise in the schools and universities, and it is therefore impossible to determine the exact origin of Hall's arguments, if such should be deemed necessary. Hall does share Seneca's premise that the more reasons one can provide to dissuade excessive grief the better, although for different motives. To Seneca excessive grief was ridiculous; to Hall it was impious.

17. Tom Fleming Kinloch, The Life and Works of Joseph Hall, 1574-1656, p. 145. Kinloch remarks, “Here, as elsewhere in his controversial writings, Hall shows himself to be entirely destitute of imaginative insight and compassion. The Scrooby congregation did not leave England out of mere willfulness. … He did not, he could not conceive, that a time was to come when a great nation would regard these humble peasants as heroes …”

18. So-called by Thomas Fuller for the “pureness, plainness, and fulness of his style.” Worthies, p. 320. In a letter from Sir Henry Wotton to Samuel Collins, 17 January 1637, Wotton referred to Hall as our “spiritual Seneca.” Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, ed. L. P. Smith (Oxford, 1907), II, 370. The sobriquet was apparently not uncommon.

19. Works, III (Part I), 321.

20. The beginnings of anti-Ciceronianism have been traced by Morris Croll in a series of essays collected in Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm, ed. J. Max Patrick, Robert O. Evans, et al. (Princeton, 1966). Supplementing Croll is George Williamson, The Senecan Amble (Chicago, 1951). For a dissenting view of Hall's Senecanism, see Harold Fisch, “The Limits of Hall's Senecanism,” Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical Society, 6 (1950), 453-63.

21. Works, ed. Basil Montagu (Philadelphia, 1876), I, 170.

22. Croll, pp. 54-64.

23. On this aspect of Ramism, see Perry Miller, The New England Mind: the Seventeenth-Century (Harvard, 1954), pp. 300-62, and W. J. Ong, pp. 212-13 and 283-88.

24. Croll, pp. 176, 192.