The periodical essayists had La Bruyère, and Earle's _Microcosmography: A Piece of the World discovered in Essays and Characters_, and Sir Thomas Overbury with his much learned gentlemen, and Theophrastus, the father of them all, well in their memory. They too were collectors of Characters and observers of public morals and censurers of private follies. La Bruyère's aims with something more were theirs. Hazlitt's is so excellent a description of their work that I shall quote it instead of writing a stupid one. '_Quicquid agunt homines nostri farrago libelli_, is the general motto of this department of literature.... It makes familiar with the world of men and women, assigns their motives, exhibits their whims, characterises their pursuits in all their singular and endless variety, ridicules their absurdities, exposes their inconsistencies, "holds the mirror up to nature, and shows the very age and body of the time its form and pressure"; takes minutes of our dress, air, looks, words, thoughts, and actions; shows us what we are, and what we are not; plays the whole game of human life over before us, and by making us enlightened spectators of its many coloured scenes, enables us (if possible) to become tolerably reasonable agents in the one in which we have to perform a part.' We might be listening to a description of the eighteenth century novel of manners. Fanny Burney would have recognised these pretensions for her secret own, though she might have blushed to see them so emblazoned. [Minuteness of observation.] _The Tatler_, _The Spectator_, _The Guardian_, and the rest of them, are like a long series of skirmishes in a determined campaign on the part of the essayists to cross the borderland of narrative. Their traditions, the Character, Montaigne, and Bacon, were very different from those of the story-tellers. The canvases prescribed for them were not huge things almost shutting out the sky, but a very small stock size, two or three pages only, to lie two days on coffee-house tables, and be used for wrapping butter on the third. The essayists were like men compelled to examine an elephant with a pocket microscope. Each subject, small as it was, hid all others for the moment, so that their observation made mountain peaks and ranges out of pimples and creases. These very limitations sharpened the weapons of their struggle, the weapons that were at last to be taken over by the novelists. The small canvas made carelessness impossible, and this compulsory attention to detail gave a new dignity to the trivialities that the novelists had so far overlooked. [Mr. Bickerstaff.]