treatment, the fashion of the short character had passed.

Yet the seventeenth century did not know its richness. None of its
best characters were then printed. The writers themselves could not
have suspected how many others were similarly engaged, so far were
they from belonging to a school. The characters in Clarendon's
_History of the Rebellion_ were too intimate and searching to be
published at once, and they remained in manuscript till about
thirty years after his death. In the interval Burnet was drawing the
characters in his _History of His Own Time_. He, like Clarendon,
was not aware of being indebted to any English model. Throughout the
period which they cover there are the characters by Fuller, Sir Philip
Warwick, Baxter, Halifax, Shaftesbury, and many others, the Latin
characters by Milton, and the verse characters by Dryden. There is no
sign that any of these writers copied another or tried to emulate
him. Together, but with no sense of their community, they made the
seventeenth century the great age of the character in England.




I. The Beginnings.


The art of literary portraiture in the seventeenth century developed
with the effort to improve the writing of history. Its first and at
all times its chief purpose in England was to show to later ages what
kind of men had directed the affairs and shaped the fortunes of
the nation. In France it was to be practised as a mere pastime; to
sketch well-known figures in society, or to sketch oneself, was for