CHARACTER WRITING AFTER THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
Character of the Happy Warrior




CHARACTER WRITINGS

OF THE

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.


_Character writing, as a distinct form of Literature, had its origin
more than two thousand years ago in the [Greek: aethichoi
Chadaaedes]---Ethic Characters--of Tyrtamus of Lesbos, a disciple of
Plato, who gave him for his eloquence the name of Divine
Speaker--Theophrastus. Aristotle left him his library and all his MSS.,
and named him his successor in the schools of the Lyceum. Nicomachus,
the son of Aristotle, was among his pupils. He followed in the steps of
Aristotle. Diogenes Laertius ascribed to Theophrastus two hundred and
twenty books. He founded, by a History of Plants, the science of Botany;
and he is now best known by the little contribution to Moral Philosophy,
in which he gave twenty-eight short chapters to concise description of
twenty-eight differing qualities in men. The description in each chapter
was not of a man, but of a quality. The method of Theophrastus, as
Casaubon said, was between the philosophical and the poetical. He
described a quality, but he described it by personification, and his aim