manners of the man who dissembles.  After that I will endeavour to describe also the other qualities of mind, each in its kind.  Then follow the Characters of these twenty-eight qualities:  Dissimulation, Adulation, Garrulity, Rusticity, Blandishment, Senselessness, Loquacity, Newsmongering, Impudence, Sordid Parsimony, Impurity, Ill-timed Approach, Inept Sedulity, Stupidity, Contumacy, Superstition, Querulousness, Distrust, Dirtiness, Tediousness, Sordid or Frivolous Desire for Praise, Illiberality, Ostentation, Pride, Timidity, Oligarchy, or the vehement desire for honour, without greed for money, Insolence, and Evil Speaking.  One of these Characters may serve as an example of their method, and show their place in the ancestry of Characters as they were written in England in the Seventeenth Century.

STUPIDITY.

You may define Stupidity as a slowness of mind in word or deed.  But the Stupid Man is one who, sitting at his counters, and having made all his calculations and worked out his sum, asks one who sits by him how much it comes to.  When any one has a suit against him, and he has come to the day when the cause must be decided, he forgets it and walks out into his field.  Often also when he sits to see a play, the rest go out and he is left, fallen asleep in the theatre.  The same man, having eaten too much, will go out in the night to relieve himself, and fall over the neighbour’s dog, who bites him.  The same man, having hidden away what he has received, is always searching for it, and never finds it.  And when it is announced to him that one of his intimate friends is dead, and he is asked to the funeral, then, with a face set to sadness and tears, he says, “Good luck to it!” When he receives money owing to him he calls in witnesses, and in midwinter he scolds his man for not having gathered cucumbers.  To train his boys for wrestling he makes them race till they are tired.  Cooking his own lentils in the field, he throws salt twice into the pot and makes them uneatable.  When it rains he says, “How sweet I find this water of the stars.”  And when some one asks, “How many have passed the gates of death?” [proverbial phrase for a great number] answers, “As many, I hope, as will be enough for you and me.”

The first and the best sequence of “Characters” in English Literature is the series of sketches of the Pilgrims in the Prologue to Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” The Characters are so varied as to unite in representing the whole character of English life in Chaucer’s day; and they are, written upon one plan, each with suggestion of the outward body and its dress as well as of the mind within.  But Chaucer owed nothing to Theophrastus.  In his Character Writing he drew all from nature with his own good wit.  La Bruyere in France translated the characters of Theophrastus, and his own writing of Characters in the seventeenth century followed a fashion that had its origin in admiration of the