Sir Thomas Overbury was born in Warwickshire in 1581: was the son of a Gloucestershire squire, was a gentleman commoner of Queen's College, Oxford, 1595-1598, entered the Middle Temple, and passed some years abroad. On his return he became, in Scotland, the friend of Robert Carr (or Ker), son of Ker of Fernihirst, one of Queen Mary's Border partisans. Carr, who was handsome, became King James's minion, and, in 1613, was created Earl of Somerset. His friend Overbury obtained a place at Court; and was first the friend, then the foe of Ben Jonson. An ally of Somerset, Overbury dissuaded him from his fatal marriage with Frances Howard, who, after a child-marriage (1606) with the boy Earl of Essex, detested him, loved Somerset, and, backed by James's influence, in spite of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Abbott, obtained a decree of nullity against her husband. The poet Donne, as Somerset's adviser, and the poet Campion, as a physician connected with a courtier more or less concerned in the affair, were entangled in this odious and mysterious matter. Overbury, on the other hand, was opposed to the unholy marriage of Somerset, and is thought to have written his popular poem "The Wife," to show him that Lady Essex was not what a wife should be. She plotted in various ways to get rid of Overbury. The offer of a diplomatic post in Paris he refused, with insolence it seems; he was sent to the Tower, and there, through the instigation of Lady Essex, was poisoned, with circumstances of bungling cruelty: for, as we know in the Spanish case of Escovedo, the science of poisoning was then quite in its infancy. Overbury died on 15 September, 1613. His death provoked many elegies and gave popularity to his poem "The Wife" (1614), which is of very slight merit, and to his "Characters," brief mordant sketches of types of men, in prose by Overbury and his friends. They appear to have been suggested rather by the Characters of the Greek Theophrastus, than by Montaigne or Bacon. Some pieces are ideal, "The Good Wife," and the charming "Fair and Happy Milkmaid," worthy of Izaak Walton. "She is never alone for she is still accompanied with old songs, honest thoughts, and prayers, but short ones.... Thus lives she, and all her care is she may die in the spring-time, to have store of flowers stuck upon her winding-sheet." Most of the other characters are drawn in a mocking style. Of "A Mere Scholar" we learn that "the antiquity of his University is his creed; and the excellency of his College, though but for a match of football, an article of his faith". "The Mere Fellow of a House," or don, with his airs of a man of the world, provokes the handsome courtier, and ex-undergraduate of Queen's. This on the scholar is good, "University jests are his universal discourse and his news the demeanour of the Proctors". Overbury jests at "The Melancholy Man".