and the rest of the Essayists, in another. Sir Thomas Overbury's
_Characters_, written in the Baconian age, are found delightful
by some; but for my own part, though I have striven to follow the
critic's golden rule, to have preferences but no exclusions, Overbury
has for me no savour. In the great art of painting moral portraits,
or character-writing, the characters in Clarendon, or in Burnet's
_History of His Own Time_, are full of life, vigour, and coherency,
and are intensely attractive to read. I cannot agree with those who
put either Clarendon or Burnet on a level with the characters in St.
Simon or the Cardinal de Retz: there is a subtlety of analysis, a
searching penetration, a breadth of moral comprehension, in the
Frenchmen, which I do not find, nor, in truth, much desire to find,
in our countrymen. A homelier hand does well enough for homelier men.
Nevertheless, such characters as those of Falkland, or Chillingworth,
by Clarendon, or Burnet's very different Lauderdale, are worth a
thousand battle-pieces, cabinet plots, or parliamentary combinations,
of which we never can be sure that the narrator either knew or has
told the whole story. It is true that these characters have not the
strange quality which some one imputed to the writing of Tacitus, that
it seems to put the reader himself and the secrets of his own heart
into the confessional. It is in the novel that, in this country, the
faculty of observing social man and his peculiarities has found its
most popular instrument. The great novel, not of romance or adventure,
but of character and manners, from the mighty Fielding, down, at a
long interval, to Thackeray, covers the field that in France is held,
and successfully held, against all comers, by her maxim-writers, like
La Rochefoucauld, and her character-writers, like La Bruyère. But the
literature of aphorism contains one English name of magnificent and
immortal lustre--the name of Francis Bacon. Bacon's essays are the
unique masterpiece in our literature of this oracular wisdom of life,