A Modern Statesman
  A Duke of Bucks
  A Fantastic
  An Haranguer
  A Ranter
  An Amorist
  An Astrologer
  A Lawyer
  An Epigrammatist
  A Fanatic
  A Proselyte
  A Clown
  A Wooer
  An Impudent Man
  An Imitator
  A Sot
  A Juggler
  A Romance-Writer
  A Libeller
  A Factious Member
  A Play-Writer
  A Mountebank
  A Wittol
  A Litigious Man
  A Humourist
  A Leader of a Faction
  A Debauched Man
  The Seditious Man
  The Rude Man
  A Rabble
  A Knight of the Post
  An Undeserving Favourite
  A Malicious Man
  A Knave

CHARACTER WRITING AFTER THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

William Wordsworth
Character of the Happy Warrior

CHARACTER WRITINGS

OF THE

Seventeenth century.

Character writing, as a distinct form of Literature, had its origin more than two thousand years ago in the [Greek:  aethichoi Chadaaedes]—–­Ethic Characters—­of Tyrtamus of Lesbos, a disciple of Plato, who gave him for his eloquence the name of Divine Speaker—­Theophrastus.  Aristotle left him his library and all his MSS., and named him his successor in the schools of the Lyceum.  Nicomachus, the son of Aristotle, was among his pupils.  He followed in the steps of Aristotle.  Diogenes Laertius ascribed to Theophrastus two hundred and twenty books.  He founded, by a History of Plants, the science of Botany; and he is now best known by the little contribution to Moral Philosophy, in which he gave twenty-eight short chapters to concise description of twenty-eight differing qualities in men.  The description in each chapter was not of a man, but of a quality.  The method of Theophrastus, as Casaubon said, was between the philosophical and the poetical.  He described a quality, but he described it by personification, and his aim was the amending of men’s manners.  The twenty-eight chapters that have come down to us are probably no more than a fragment of a larger work.  They describe vices, and not all of them.  Another part, now lost, may have described the virtues.  In a short proem the writer speaks of himself as ninety-nine years old.  Probably those two nines were only a poetical suggestion of long experience from which these pictures of the constituents of human life and action had been drawn.  He had wondered, he said, before he thought of writing such a book, at the diversities of manners among Greeks all born under one sky and trained alike.  For many years he had considered and compared the ways of men; he had lived to be ninety-nine.  Our children may be the better for a knowledge of our ways of daily life, that they may grow into the best.  Observe and see whether I describe them rightly.  I will begin, he says, with Dissimulation.  I will first define the vice, and then describe the quality and