manner. The portrait was more than a fashion at this time in France;
it was the rage. It therefore invited the satirists. Molière has a
passing jest at them in his _Précieuses Ridicules_;[14] Charles Sorel
published his _Description de I'isle de la Portraiture et de la ville
des Portraits_; and Boileau wrote his _Héros de Roman_.

The effects of all this in England are certainly not obvious. It is
quite a tenable view that the English characters would have been
no less numerous, nor in any way different in quality, had every
Englishman been ignorant of French. But the _mémoires_ and romances
were well known, and it was after 1660 that the art of the character
attained its fullest excellence. The literary career of Clarendon
poses the question in a simple form. Most of his characters, and the
best as a whole, were written at Montpelier towards the close of
his life. Did he find in French literature an incentive to indulge
and perfect his natural bent? Yet there can be no conclusive answer
to those who find a sufficient explanation in the leisure of these
unhappy years, and in the solace that comes to chiefs out of war
and statesmen out of place in ruminating on their experiences and
impressions.

* * * * *

Something may have been learned also from the other kind of character
that is found at its best in modern literature in the seventeenth
century, the character derived from Theophrastus, and depicting not
the individual but the type. In France, the one kind led on to the
other. The romances of Scudéry prepared the way for the _Caractères ou
les Moeurs de ce Siècle_ of La Bruyère. When the fashionable portrait
of particular persons fell out of favour, there arose in its place the