Note R — PREFACE.
Reading edition
Between Earle himself and Berkeley there is much resemblance. Of Berkeley too it would have been said—"a person certainly of the sweetest and most obliging nature that lived in our age"; and this resemblance extends beyond their social gifts or their cast of mind, even to their language. Earle's "vulgar-spirited" man, with whom "to thrive is to do well," recalls a famous passage in the Siris.
"He that hath not thought much about God, the human soul, and the summum bonum, may indeed be a thriving earth-worm, but he will make a sorry patriot, and a sorry statesman."