We shall commence with the substantial characters, and see how their histories fall in with the fortunes attributed to the allegorical. Rose Daniel's husband, maugre his celebrity and places of dignity and profit, was beset with tempers and oddities which exposed him, more perhaps than any man of his time, to the ridicule of contemporary wits and poets. He was, at least in his literary career, jealous, envious, irritable, vain, pedantic and bombastical, petulant and quarrelsome,--ever on the watch for an affront, and always in the attitude of a fretful porcupine with a quill pointed in every direction against real or supposititious enemies. In such a state of mental alarm and physical vaporing did he live, that he seems to have proclaimed a promiscuous war against all gainsayers,-- that is, the literary world; and for the better assurance to them of his indomitable valor, and to himself of indemnity from disturbance, he adopted a formidable prefix to his name; and to "any bill, warrant, quittance, or obligation," to every address, prelude, preface, [8] introduction, or farewell, accompanying any of his numerous works, he subscribed himself the Resolute,--"Resolute John Florio." Conduct so absurd, coupled with some personal defects, and a character so petulantly vainglorious, exposed the "Resolute" to the bitter sarcasm of contemporary writers. Accordingly we find him through life encompassed by a host of tormentors, and presenting his _chevaux-de-frise_ of quills against them at all and every point. In the Epistle Dedicatory to the second edition of his Dictionary, we find him engaged _morsu et unguibus_ with a swarm of literary hornets, against whom he inveighs as "sea-dogs,--land-critics, --monsters of men, if not beasts rather than men,--whose teeth are cannibals',--their tongues adders' forks,--their lips asps' poison, --their eyes basilisks',--their breath the breath of a grave,--their words like swords of Turks, which strive which shall dive deepest into the Christian lying before them." Of a verity we may say that John Florio was sadly exercised when he penned this pungent paragraph. He then falls foul of the players, who--to use the technical phrase of the day--"staged" him with no small success. "With this common cry of curs" in general, and with _one poet_ and _one piece_ of said poet's handiwork in particular, he enters into mortal combat with such vehement individuality as enables us at a glance to detect the offence and the offender. He says, "Let Aristophanes and his comedians make plays and scour their mouths on Socrates, these very mouths they make to vilify shall be the means to amplify his virtues," etc. "And here," says Doctor Warburton, "Shakspeare is so clearly marked out as not to be mistaken." This opinion is fortified by the concurrence of Farmer, Steevens, Reid, Malone, Knight, Collier, and Hunter; and, from the additional lights thrown upon this subject by