Joseph Hall is an excellent example of a major minor: a writer of importance and influence in his own day who has survived largely as a "background" figure in literary history. Hall's long and productive career as writer and divine spanned one of the most eventful periods of English literary, political, and ecclesiastical history. A century after his death, he was still renowned enough to be called "the famous Dr. Joseph Hall" by Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy (1759-1767); today Hall is known to specialists and remembered for his naturalizations into English of formal verse satire and the Theophrastan character sketch, Characters of Vertues and Vices (1608). His devotional prose, however, may prove to be his most enduring contribution to English poetry, as it has been much studied in recent scholarship on religious verse of the period. Hall's controversial pamphlets played an important role in defining the Church of...