to catch a particular Object; but cannot represent that Object in its
full Light, without giving us a little Landskip of every thing else
that lies about it."[4] By Gally's time writers like Pascal, La
Rochefoucauld, and La Bruyère had done much to show the complex
and paradoxical nature of human behaviour. Gally, who praises La
Rochefoucauld as the one modern as well equipped as Theophrastus to
compose characters, reacts with his age against the stale types which
both comedy and the character had been retailing _ad nauseam_. Human
nature, says Gally, is full of subtle shadings and agreeable variations
which the character ought to exploit. He quotes Temple to the effect
that England is richer than any other nation in "original Humours" and
wonders that no one has yet attempted a comprehensive portrait-gallery
of English personality. Those writers who have come closest to Gally's
idea of how "humour" ought to be handled are the "great Authors" of the
_Tatlers_ and _Spectators_, with their "interspers'd Characters of Men
and Manners compleatly drawn to the Life."

In admiring the Roger de Coverley sketches, Gally typifies the
increasingly tolerant attitude of the Augustans toward eccentric
behavior.[5] Like Sterne and Fielding he is delighted by people whose
idiosyncracies are harmless and appealing. As for the harsh satiric
animus of a character-writer like Butler, it is totally alien to Gally,
who would chide good-naturedly, so as "not to seem to make any Attacks
upon the Province of Self-Love" in the reader. "Each Man," he writes,
"contains a little World within himself, and every Heart is a new
World." The writer should understand and appreciate, not ridicule,
an individual's uniqueness.

Of course, the character as Theophrastus wrote it described the type,
not the particular person. Gally, who sets up Theophrastus as his model,