If I were asked which was the first English novel of character-study, as I am asking myself now, I should reply, as I reply now, those essays in the _Spectator_ that are concerned with Sir Roger de Coverley. Set that little series of pictures in a book by themselves, as has been done with appropriate and delightful illustrations by Mr. Hugh Thomson, and in reading them you will find it hard to remember that you are not enjoying a more than usually leisurely kind of narrative. The knight is shown to us in different scenes; we watch him at the assizes, leaning over to the judge to congratulate him on the good weather his lordship enjoys; we see him smile in greeting of Will Wimble; we watch him fidget in his seat with impatience of the misdeeds of the villain in the play; we hear of his death with a tear in our eye that is a testimony to the completeness and humanity of the portraiture. If only his love-story were thinly spread throughout the book and not begun and ended in a chapter, _Sir Roger de Coverley_ would be a novel indeed. As it is, in that delicate picture of a country gentleman and country life--for Sir Roger does not stand against a black curtain for his portraiture, but before his tenants and his friends--we have the promise of _The Vicar of Wakefield_ and of _Cranford_, and of all that chaste and tender kind of story-telling that is almost peculiar to our literature. [Johnson and Goldsmith.] Johnson and Goldsmith followed the tradition. Even the ponderous Doctor could step lightly at times, and never so lightly as when he obeyed the instinct that turns discussion into fiction and essays into sketches. He too can write his letters, and that from Mrs. Deborah Ginger, the unfortunate wife of a city wit, is a story in itself. And as for Goldsmith, he can hardly hold his pen for half a paragraph before it breaks away from the hard road of ideas and goes merrily along the bridle-path of mere humanity. His letters from Lien Chi Altangi, that serious Chinese busied in exposing the follies of the Occident, turn continually to story-telling. A wise remark will usher in an Eastern tale, and, not even in the papers of Steele or Addison are the subjects of characters, like the little beau, who would have been a 'mere indigent gallant,' magicked so deliciously to life. Finally, he did with 'The Man in Black' what Addison and Steele could so well have done with Sir Roger. Fielding and Smollett had written before him, and he saw that he could follow their art without resigning any of the graces of the essayist. [The later essayists.]