As has been stated early in this book, it was in the seventeenth century that this interest in character was first wakened. Shakespeare had brought to the drama, which before him was concerned with actions viewed outwardly, a psychological interest; he had taught that "character is destiny," and that men's actions and fates spring not from outward agencies, but from within in their own souls. The age began to take a deep and curious interest in men's lives; biography was written for the first time and autobiography; it is the great period of memoir-writing both in England and France; authors like Robert Burton came, whose delight it was to dig down into human nature in search for oddities and individualities of disposition; humanity as the great subject of enquiry for all men, came to its own. All this has a direct bearing on the birth of the novel. One transient form of literature in the seventeenth century--the Character--is an ancestor in the direct line. The collections of them--Earle's _Microcosmography_ is the best--are not very exciting reading, and they never perhaps quite succeeded in naturalizing a form borrowed from the later age of Greece, but their importance in the history of the novel to come is clear. Take them and add them to the story of adventure--_i.e._, introduce each fresh person in your plot with a description in the character form, and the step you have made towards the novel is enormous; you have given to plot which was already there, the added interest of character. That, however, was not quite how the thing worked in actual fact. At the heels of the "Character" came the periodical essay of Addison and Steele. Their interest in contemporary types was of the same quality as Earle's or Hall's, but they went a different way to work. Where these compressed and cultivated a style which was staccato and epigrammatic, huddling all the traits of their subject in short sharp sentences that follow each other with all the brevity and curtness of items in a prescription, Addison and Steele observed a more artistic plan. They made, as it were, the prescription up, adding one ingredient after another slowly as the mixture dissolved. You are introduced to Sir Roger de Coverley, and to a number of other typical people, and then in a series of essays which if they were disengaged from their setting would be to all intents a novel and a fine one, you are made aware one by one of different traits in his character and those of his friends, each trait generally enshrined in an incident which illustrates it; you get to know them, that is, gradually, as you would in real life, and not all in a breath, in a series of compressed statements, as is the way of the character writers. With the Coverley essays in the _Spectator_, the novel in one of its forms--that in which an invisible and all knowing narrator tells a story in which some one else whose character he lays bare for us is the hero--is as good as achieved.