His essay on the character, however, deserves attention because it is the first detailed and serious discussion by an Englishman of a literary kind immensely popular in its day. English writers before Gally had, of course, commented on the character. Overbury, for example, in "What A Character Is" (_Sir Thomas Overbury His Wife..._ 1616) had defined the character as "wit's descant on any plain-song," and Brathwaite in his Dedication to _Whimzies_(1631) had written that character-writers must shun affectation and prefer the "pith before the rind." Wye Saltonstall in the same year in his Dedicatory Epistle to _Picturae Loquentes_ had required of a character "lively and exact Lineaments" and "fast and loose knots which the ingenious Reader may easily untie." These remarks, however, as also Flecknoe's "Of the Author's Idea of a Character" (_Enigmaticall Characters_, 1658) and Ralph Johnson's "rules" for character-writing in _A Scholar's Guide from the Accidence to the University_ (1665), are fragmentary and oblique. Nor do either of the two English translations of Theophrastus before Gally--the one a rendering of La Bruyère's French version,[1] and the other, Eustace Budgell's _The Moral Characters of Theophrastus_ (1714)--touch more than in passing on the nature of the character. Gally's essay, in which he claims to deduce his critical principles from the practice of Theophrastus, is both historically and intrinsically the most important work of its kind. Section I of Gally's essay, thoroughly conventional in nature, is omitted here. In it Gally, following Casaubon,[2] theorizes that the character evolved out of Greek Old Comedy. The Augustans saw a close connection between drama and character-writing. Congreve (Dedication to _The Way of the World_, 1700) thought that the comic dramatist Menander formed his characters on "the observations of Theophrastus, of whom he was a disciple," and Budgell, who termed Theophrastus the father of modern comedy, believed that if some of Theophrastus's characters "were well worked up, and brought upon the British theatre, they could not fail of Success."[3] Gally similarly held that a dramatic character and Theophrastan character differ only in the different Manner of representing the same Image. The _Drama_ presents to the Eyes of a Spectator an Actor, who speaks and acts as the Person, whom he represents, is suppos'd to speak and act in real Life. The _Characteristic_ Writer introduces, in a descriptive manner, before a Reader, the same Person, as speaking and acting in the same manner. Section III of Gally's essay, like Section I thoroughly conventional, is also omitted here. Gally attributes to Theophrastus the spurious "Proem," in which Theophrastus, emphasizing his ethical purpose, announces his intention of following up his characters of vice with characters of virtue. At one point Gally asserts that Theophrastus taught the same doctrine as Aristotle and Plato, but