You may define Stupidity as a slowness of mind in word or deed. But the Stupid Man is one who, sitting at his counters, and having made all his calculations and worked out his sum, asks one who sits by him how much it comes to. When any one has a suit against him, and he has come to the day when the cause must be decided, he forgets it and walks out into his field. Often also when he sits to see a play, the rest go out and he is left, fallen asleep in the theatre. The same man, having eaten too much, will go out in the night to relieve himself, and fall over the neighbour's dog, who bites him. The same man, having hidden away what he has received, is always searching for it, and never finds it. And when it is announced to him that one of his intimate friends is dead, and he is asked to the funeral, then, with a face set to sadness and tears, he says, "Good luck to it!" When he receives money owing to him he calls in witnesses, and in midwinter he scolds his man for not having gathered cucumbers. To train his boys for wrestling he makes them race till they are tired. Cooking his own lentils in the field, he throws salt twice into the pot and makes them uneatable. When it rains he says, "How sweet I find this water of the stars." And when some one asks, "How many have passed the gates of death?" [proverbial phrase for a great number] answers, "As many, I hope, as will be enough for you and me." _The first and the best sequence of "Characters" in English Literature is the series of sketches of the Pilgrims in the Prologue to Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" The Characters are so varied as to unite in representing the whole character of English life in Chaucer's day; and they are, written upon one plan, each with suggestion of the outward body and its dress as well as of the mind within. But Chaucer owed nothing to Theophrastus. In his Character Writing he drew all from nature with his own good wit. La Bruyère in France translated the characters of Theophrastus, and his own writing of Characters in the seventeenth century followed a fashion that had its origin in admiration of the wit of those Greek Ethical Characters. La Bruyère was born in 1639 and died in 1696. Our Joseph Hall, whose "Characters of Vices and Virtues" were written in 1608, and translated into French twenty years before La Bruyère was born, said, in his Preface to them, "I have done as I could, following that ancient Master of Morality who thought this the fittest task for the ninety-ninth year of his age, and the profitablest Monument that he could leave for a farewell to his Grecians."