Select Tracts from the Writings of the ... Rev. J. Hall

by Joseph Hall (Creator)

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532 pages, Paperback

Published August 2, 2019

About the author

Joseph Hall (1574-1656) was Bishop of Norwich and has left among his works two tracts (‘Observations of some Specialties of Divine Providence in the Life of Joseph Hall, Bishop of Norwich,’ and ‘Hard Measure’), which, together, form a useful and interesting autobiography. The first part of his education was received at the grammar school at Ashby. When he was of the age of fifteen Mr. Pelset, lecturer at Leicester, a divine of puritan views, offered to take him ‘under indentures’ and educate him for the ministry. Just before this arrangement was completed, it came to the knowledge of Nathaniel Gilby, son of Anthony Gilby and a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, who was a friend of the family. Gilby induced Hall's father to send his son to Emmanuel College in 1589. The expense of his education at the university was partly borne by his uncle, Edmund Sleigh. He was elected scholar and afterwards fellow of Emmanuel College (1595), graduating B.A. in 1592 and M.A. in 1596 (B.D. 1603 and D.D. 1612). Fuller, nearly a contemporary, says that Hall ‘passed all his degrees with great applause.’ He obtained a high reputation in the university for scholarship, and read the public rhetoric lecture in the schools for two years with much credit.

Hall's earliest published verse appeared in a collection of elegies on the death of Dr. William Whitaker, to which he contributed the only English poem (1596). A line in John Marston's ‘Pigmalion's Image’ (1598) proves that Hall also wrote pastoral poems at an early age, but none of these have survived. He first made a reputation as a writer by his pungent satires, published in 1597 under the title of ‘Virgidemiarum, Sixe Bookes. First three bookes of Toothlesse Satyrs’ (Lond. by Thomas Creede), 12mo. A second volume, with the same general title, containing ‘three last bookes of byting Satyres,’ followed in 1598. New editions appeared in 1599 and 1602. They have been frequently republished and illustrated by Warton, Singer, Ellis, and Dr. Grosart (1879). These satires are formed on the model of the Latin satirists.