Persons and Things.”  Sir William Coventry’s “Character of a Trimmer,” published in 1689, had been written before 1659, when it had been answered by a “Character of a Tory,” not printed at the time, but included (1721) in the works of George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham.  In 1689 appeared “Characters addressed to Ladies of Age,” and also “The Ceremony-Monger his Character, in Six Chapters, by E. Hickeringill, Rector of All Saints, Colchester.”  Ohe!  Enough, enough!

SAMUEL BUTLER,

Author of “Hudibras,” who died in 1680, also exercised his wit in Character writing.  When Butler’s “Remains” were published in two volumes in 1759 by R. Thyer, Keeper of the Public Library of Manchester, 460 pages of the second volume, (all the volume except forty or fifty pages of “Thoughts on Various Subjects,”) was occupied by a collection of 120 Characters that he had written.  I close this volume of “Character Writings of the Seventeenth Century” with as many of Samuel Butler’s Characters as the book has room for,—­none are wittier—­space being left for one Character by a poet of our own century, Wordsworth’s “Character of the Happy Warrior” to bring us to a happy close.

CHARACTERS.

BY SAMUEL BUTLER.

A DEGENERATE NOBLE; OR, ONE THAT IS PROUD OF HIS BIRTH,

Is like a turnip, there is nothing good of him but that which is underground; or rhubarb, a contemptible shrub that springs from a noble root.  He has no more title to the worth and virtue of his ancestors than the worms that were engendered in their dead bodies, and yet he believes he has enough to exempt himself and his posterity from all things of that nature for ever.  This makes him glory in the antiquity of his family, as if his nobility were the better the further off it is, in time as well as desert, from that of his predecessors.  He believes the honour that was left him as well as the estate is sufficient to support his quality without troubling himself to purchase any more of his own; and he meddles us little with the management of the one as the other, but trusts both to the government of his servants, by whom he is equally cheated in both.  He supposes the empty title of honour sufficient to serve his turn, though he has spent the substance and reality of it, like the fellow that sold his ass but would not part with the shadow of it; or Apicius, that sold his house, and kept only the balcony to see and be seen in.  And because he is privileged from being arrested for his debts, supposes he has the same freedom from all obligations he owes humanity and his country, because he is not punishable for his ignorance and want of honour, no more than poverty or unskilfulness is in other professions, which the law supposes to be punishment enough to itself.  He is like a fanatic, that