1 References to Francis Bacon, Essays (1597); and Francis Bacon, The Essays, Or Counsels (1625); See also the authoritative edition by Michael Kiernan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).

² References to Michel Montaigne, Essays, trans. John Florio (1603), 3 vols. (repr. New York: AMS Press, 1963).

³ References to Scott Black, Of Essays and Reading in Early Modern Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

⁴ Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artefacts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 81.

⁵ In Fish’s view, a characteristic of Bacon’s method is the accommodation of ‘disparate and contradictory visions’, Fish, Self-Consuming Artefacts, 119.

⁶ See Markku Peltonen, ‘Bacon, Francis’, ODNB <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/990?docPos=1> accessed 18 March 2013.

⁷ Ben Jonson, Timber or Discoveries (1641), N4.

⁸ Don Cameron Allen, ed., Essayes by Sir William Cornwallis the Younger (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1946), ix; Allen suggests that Bacon’s 1597 volume is of aphorisms, rather than essays, but that seems to me to be splitting hairs, and one can give Bacon credit as first essayist but see Cornwallis as similarly pioneering, especially prior to Bacon’s revised 1612 collection. References are to this edition of Cornwallis.

⁹ In Essay 12, ‘Of Censuring’, Cornwallis praises Montaigne, but says that he has not read him in French, but rather, in an English translation (though apparently not Florio’s), 42; and see Allen’s note.

¹⁰ R. E. Bennett, ‘Four Paradoxes by Sir William Cornwallis the Younger’, Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, 13 (1931): 219–40; references are to this edition.

¹¹ Essayes of certaine Paradoxes (1617).

¹² See Bennett, ‘Four Paradoxes’, 220; Cornwallis’s father was the ambassador to Spain from 1604 to 1609.

¹³ John Donne, Paradoxes and Problems, ed. Helen Peters (Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1980), xx.

¹⁴ References to Paradoxes and Problems.

¹⁵ John Donne, Essays in Divinity, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), 51.

¹⁶ Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624), 415–16.

¹⁷ Rosalie Colie, The Resources of Kind: Genre Theory in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).

¹⁸ For an account of the changing nature of the volume see McCrea Hazlett, ‘ “New Frame and Various Composition”: Development in the Form of Owen Felltham’s “Resolves”’, Modern Philology, 51 (1953): 93–101.

¹⁹ On this see Ted Larry Pebworth, ‘ “Real English Evidence”: Stoicism and the English Essay Tradition’, PMLA, 87 (1972): 101–2.

²⁰ References to Owen Felltham, Resolves (1623).

²¹ Kate Lilley, ‘Dedicated Thought: Montaigne, Bacon, and the English Renaissance Essay’, in Susannah Brietz Monta and Margaret W. Ferguson, eds., Teaching Early Modern Prose (New York: MLA, 2010), 95–112.

²² ‘Dedicated Thought’, 109.

²³ For the literary and political responses to the scandal see especially Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

²⁴ References to A Wife now the Widow of Sir Thomas Overbury (1614, the fifth impression).

²⁵ References to John Earle, Microcosmographie (1628). Earle’s autograph manuscript is held in the Bodleian Library (Eng. Misc. f. 89) and is also available in facsimile (Leeds: Scolar Press, 1966); quotations have been checked against it.

²⁶ Richard Brathwait, Essays Upon the Five Senses (1620), 51; Brathwait is another example of the dual popularity of Essay and Character, as he includes the Character of a Shrew and a sequence of resolves in this volume.

²⁷ References to Henry Peacham’s The Truth of Our Times (1638).

²⁸ Helen Deutsch, ‘The Body’s Moments’, Prose Studies, 27 (2005): 11–26.