With Earle we are nearer the drawing of individuals, and so to a tenderer touch on idiosyncrasies. He relies less on quaint conceits (though he has plenty of them and charming ones at command; witness the child whose 'father hath writ him as his owne little story, wherein hee reads those dayes of his life that hee cannot remember') and trusts more often to fragments of real observation. His Characters are not so consistently wit's descant on a plain song. He is often content to give us a plain descant on a plain song--less concerned with his cleverness than with his subjects. With Earle we are already some way from the age of Elizabeth, and indeed Overbury, though he was able to quarrel with Ben Jonson, and in spite of his Renaissance death, seems to have a part in a less youthful century. In his wisdom, in his wise advice unwisely given to his friend, there is something already of the flavour of Addison; an essence ever so slight of the sound morality of the periodical essayists whose work owed more than a little to his own. [La Bruyère.] The same impulse that suggested the pleasure and profit of collecting Londoners as Theophrastus had collected his Athenians, suggested also the noting of contemporary manners. Manners and Characters, especially since Characters meant peculiarities, belonged to each other. Overbury's 'Pyrate' is a picture of the times quite as much as of that sterling fellow they produced, to whom if you gave 'sea roome in never so small a vessell, like a witch in a sieve, you would think he were going to make merry with the devill.' And the portrait of 'The Faire and happy Milk-mayd' betrays in its painting more than a little of the artist and of the age in which she sat for him. This is true of the plain Character, unexpanded and unframed; it is still more true of the Character in the form it very speedily took. The Character became a paragraph in a discursive essay, and La Bruyère, who copied directly from Theophrastus, does not make series of separate portraits, but notices in his original less his picturing of types than his suggestion of their circumstances, dividing his own work into large sections, 'de la ville,' 'de la Cour,' 'des Biens de Fortune,' 'de la Société et de la Conversation,' where he seems to stroll slowly through a garden-walk of philosophy, pointing his remarks with his stick, and using such portraits as he cares to make to illustrate his general observations. His Characters are almost anecdotes. He is like the more advanced naturalist who, no longer content with his butterflies on cork and his stuffed birds stiff on perches, attempts to place them in the setting of their ordinary existence, where they may illustrate at once that existence and their own natures by some characteristic pose. How near is this to the desire of seeing them alive and in continuous action, which, if he had had it, would perhaps have made him combine his notes and sketches in a novel. [The periodical essayists.]