It would be easy to give instances:  one must suffice here.  Biography, which is one of the most characteristic kinds of English writing, was unknown to the moderns as late as the sixteenth century.  Partly the awakened interest in the careers of the ancient statesmen and soldiers which the study of Plutarch had excited, and partly the general interest in, and craving for, facts set men writing down the lives of their fellows.  The earliest English biographies date from this time.  In the beginning they were concerned, like Plutarch, with men of action, and when Sir Fulke Greville wrote a brief account of his friend Sir Philip Sidney it was the courtier and the soldier, and not the author, that he designed to celebrate.  But soon men of letters came within their scope, and though the interest in the lives of authors came too late to give us the contemporary life of Shakespeare we so much long for, it was early enough to make possible those masterpieces of condensed biography in which Isaak Walton celebrates Herbert and Donne.  Fuller and Aubrey, to name only two authors, spent lives of laborious industry in hunting down and chronicling the smallest facts about the worthies of their day and the time immediately before them.  Autobiography followed where biography led.  Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, as well as less reputable persons, followed the new mode.  By the time of the Restoration Pepys and Evelyn were keeping their diaries, and Fox his journal.  Just as in poetry the lyric, that is the expression of personal feeling, became more widely practised, more subtle and more sincere, in prose the letter, the journal, and the autobiography formed themselves to meet the new and growing demand for analysis of the feelings and the intimate thoughts and sensations of real men and women.  A minor form of literature which had a brief but popular vogue ministered less directly to the same need.  The “Character,” a brief descriptive essay on a contemporary type—­a tobacco seller, an old college butler or the like—­was popular because in its own way it matched the newly awakened taste for realism and fact.  The drama which in the hands of Ben Jonson had attacked folly and wickedness proper to no place or time, descended to the drawing-rooms of the day, and Congreve occupied himself with the portrayal of the social frauds and foolishnesses perpetrated by actual living men and women of fashion in contemporary London.  Satire ceased to be a mere expression of a vague discontent, and became a weapon against opposing men and policies.  The new generation of readers were nothing if not critical.  They were for testing directly institutions whether they were literary, social, or political.  They wanted facts, and they wanted to take a side.