loose knots which the ingenious Reader may easily untie." These remarks,
however, as also Flecknoe's "Of the Author's Idea of a Character"
(_Enigmaticall Characters_, 1658) and Ralph Johnson's "rules" for
character-writing in _A Scholar's Guide from the Accidence to the
University_ (1665), are fragmentary and oblique. Nor do either of the
two English translations of Theophrastus before Gally--the one a
rendering of La Bruyère's French version,[1] and the other, Eustace
Budgell's _The Moral Characters of Theophrastus_ (1714)--touch more
than in passing on the nature of the character. Gally's essay, in which
he claims to deduce his critical principles from the practice of
Theophrastus, is both historically and intrinsically the most
important work of its kind.

Section I of Gally's essay, thoroughly conventional in nature, is
omitted here. In it Gally, following Casaubon,[2] theorizes that the
character evolved out of Greek Old Comedy. The Augustans saw a close
connection between drama and character-writing. Congreve (Dedication to
_The Way of the World_, 1700) thought that the comic dramatist Menander
formed his characters on "the observations of Theophrastus, of whom he
was a disciple," and Budgell, who termed Theophrastus the father of
modern comedy, believed that if some of Theophrastus's characters "were
well worked up, and brought upon the British theatre, they could not
fail of Success."[3] Gally similarly held that a dramatic character
and Theophrastan character differ only in

the different Manner of representing the same Image. The _Drama_
presents to the Eyes of a Spectator an Actor, who speaks and acts as
the Person, whom he represents, is suppos'd to speak and act in real
Life. The _Characteristic_ Writer introduces, in a descriptive manner,
before a Reader, the same Person, as speaking and acting in the same