Students of the period know well the sudden, extraordinary craze for “character-drawing” which swept over France and England at this time. In France literary “portraits” of oneself and one’s friends were produced in hundreds, the first as a hobby, the second actually as a round game; and Clarendon, whose _History of the Great Rebellion_ is a string of such character-studies, was only doing systematically what men like Hall, Overbury, Earle, and others had already done in a more disjointed and dilettante way. To the medieval observer a _person_ or a _soul_ had been interesting chiefly in its relation to Society, to the Church, to the Cosmos. “All the personality of man,” said Wyclif, “standeth in the spirit of him.” But these new writers and their readers were interested in _characters_ and _characteristics_ for their own sakes. We begin to hear of people’s _autographs_, of their _foibles_ and their _fortes_; _eccentric_ is taken from astronomy and mathematics; the Greek word _idiosyncrasy_—signifying an ‘individual mixture’ (of ‘humours’)—is borrowed from Galen; but with the new point of view the astrological and physical meanings of this and other words, like _disposition_, _humour_, _spirits_, _temperament_, ...[53] gradually fade away, and their modern meanings arise instead. One relic of these ancient physics, however—the _vapours_ which were supposed to rise into the head from the region of the stomach—lingered well on into the eighteenth century; and from the way in which Boswell and Johnson write of their fits of _melancholy_, it seems that they had just reached a point at which they could not be sure, from their feelings at any rate, whether their common malady was physical in its origin or purely mental. The same difference is observable in the names for feelings and passions. The nomenclature of the Middle Ages generally views them from without, hinting always at their results or their moral significance—_envy_, _greedy_, _happy_ (i.e. ‘lucky’), _malice_, _mercy_, _mildheartness_, _peace_, _pity_[54], _remorse_, _repentance_, _rue_, _sin_,... Even the old word _sad_ had not long lost its original sense of ‘sated’, ‘heavy’ (which it still retains in _sad bread_), and _fear_ continued for a long time to mean, not the emotion, but a ‘sudden and unexpected event’. Hardly before the beginning of the seventeenth century do we find expressed that sympathetic or “introspective” attitude to the feelings which is conveyed by such labels as _aversion_, _dissatisfaction_, _discomposure_, ... while _depression_ and _emotion_—further lenient names for human weaknesses—were used till then of material objects.