href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@26425@[email protected]#Footnote_F_6" class="fnanchor pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">[F] some enlargement of Hallam's charity might also have been looked for in dealing with the earnestness of a militant piety.

The character-sketch is naturally a thing of limited scope. "Fine portraiture,"[G] it has been said, "is not possible under such conditions as it imposes. The traits, common to a class, cannot at the same time be the accurate and intimate likeness of an individual. For this, a simple enumeration of actions which such and such a man will do, is not enough. A novelist takes a long series of connected actions, and even then he has to interpret, to review from time to time whole stages of development." All this is, no doubt, true, but the character-writers differ to a remarkable extent in their individualising power—some of them achieving a high degree of success, as is subsequently admitted in the case of Thackeray by the writer just quoted. It may be noticed too, by the way, that great novelists are not always equally successful in the character-sketch. One is reminded of Johnson's phrase about Milton's inability "to carve heads upon cherry stones" when one thinks of "Theophrastus Such" on the one hand, and the almost unique position of George Eliot as a novelist on the other. Less successful as she often is in lightness of touch when she has to pause and interpret her story, she had not prepared us for such a complete exhaustion of power as her attempt in this branch of literature (apparently of the same genus, almost of the same species, as the novel) reveals to her disappointed admirers. It may, at any rate, be said that her failure is an instructive lesson in the literary division of labour, and that these studies require a peculiar delicacy of organisation in the observer, as well as a special gift of exposition.

"Dolus latet in generalibus" is a salutary warning, but the character-writers, as a whole, have in most instances got creditably out of the snare, while Earle, I think, has achieved something more. Besides his humour and acuteness, besides even his profundity, I find in him an exceptional power of individualizing. "The contemplative man," for instance, belongs to a small class at all times; but it is only an individual we have known, and known at rare intervals, of whose Wordsworthian temper we are able to say that "Nature asks his approbation as it were of her works and variety." Again, "the grave divine, who is not yet dean or canon, though his life is our religion's best apology," reads throughout like a personal experience. I at least so read it, or I should not have borrowed from Earle for the dedication which stands at the head of this preface. Yet such identifications are usually reserved for the great novelist, whose highest art, as Macaulay says, is to "make the inventions of one man seem like the recollections of another."

Some of Earle's readers appear to be chiefly impressed with his book as furnishing "a picturesque idea of a period now remote, and as possessing much of the affected quaintness of its age."[H] The picturesqueness I find, and a good deal of quaintness; but the total impression is that of a man who has got beyond words, ancient or modern, in his studies of human nature—of one who, whether

or is "anatomizing the wise man's folly," is as instructive a moralist in the end of the nineteenth century as in the beginning of the seventeenth. This, in a sense, is true of all great moralists, but the distinction of Earle, as I understand it, is that his characters are so often really people of our own day, with idiosyncracies that seem almost more applicable to our own age than to his.

Society is almost a technical term to-day, susceptible, one would have said, of refinements of difference infinitely more various than anything that could have existed more than two hundred years ago; yet one cannot but feel that this observer would have been fully equal to drawing our microcosm as well as his own. Earle's is a penetrating observation which is always fresh—so fresh that no archaism of phrase in him, and no cheery optimism in ourselves, can disguise the fact that it is our weaknesses he is probing, our motives he is discovering.

There are still with us "those well-behaved ghosts Æneas met with—friends to talk with, and men to look on, but if he grasped them but air"—those shadowy creatures that "wonder at your ill-breeding,[I] that cannot distinguish between what is spoken and what is meant."

We are no strangers to "the fashionable respect which loves not deeper mutualities, but though exceeding kind and friendly at your first acquaintance, is at the twentieth meeting but friendly still"; or to that similar temper which "nothing so much puts out as to trespass against the genteel way." And, to go a stage lower, the formal man still survives, whose "face is in so good a frame because he is not disjointed with other meditations—who hath staid in the world to fill a number; and when he is gone there wants one and there's an end."[J] He, to be sure, has no conversation, and that is his discretion—but others display then as now a bolder discretion, and in their talk "fly for sanctuary rather to nonsense which few descry, than to nothing which all."

But literary conversation is not forgotten. It may be a stretch beyond the power of a latter-day imagination to fancy a visitor proposing to fascinate his company by some "scatterings of Seneca and Tacitus," or even to think ourselves back to a time when these "were good for all occasions." Yet, those who say "Chaucer[K] for our money above all our English poets because the voice has gone so," (or had we better substitute Browning?),[L] are still common enough examples of those who desire to acquire inexpensively the reputation of good taste.

And there is another variety of modern artificiality which is not spared in this book. For the many forms of busy idleness, the worship of organisation and system, and all the other hindrances to life properly so-called, which it has been the cherished labour of this age to multiply, Earle would have had no reserve of patience. "The dull physician," we are told, has no leisure to be idle, that is, to study. "The grave