Thus, “Marriage is a feast where the grace is sometimes better than the dinner.”  I had made some other extracts from this unhappy sage, but you will thank me for having thrown them into the fire.  Finally, a great authoress of our time was urged by a friend to fill up a gap in our literature by composing a volume of Thoughts:  the result was that least felicitous of performances, Theophrastus Such.  One living writer of genius has given us a little sheaf of subtly-pointed maxims in the Ordeal of Richard Feverel, and perhaps he will one day divulge to the world the whole contents of Sir Austin Feverel’s unpublished volume, The Pilgrim’s Scrip.

Yet the wisdom of life has its full part in our literature.  Keen insight into peculiarities of individual motive, and concentrated interest in the play of character, shine not merely in Shakespeare, whose mighty soul, as Hallam says, was saturated with moral observation, nor in the brilliant verse of Pope.  For those who love meditative reading on the ways and destinies of men, we have Burton and Fuller and Sir Thomas Browne in one age, and Addison, Johnson, and the rest of the Essayists, in another.  Sir Thomas Overbury’s Characters, written in the Baconian age, are found delightful by some; but for my own part, though I have striven to follow the critic’s golden rule, to have preferences but no exclusions, Overbury has for me no savour.  In the great art of painting moral portraits, or character-writing, the characters in Clarendon, or in Burnet’s History of His Own Time, are full of life, vigour, and coherency, and are intensely attractive to read.  I cannot agree with those who put either Clarendon or Burnet on a level with the characters in St. Simon or the Cardinal de Retz:  there is a subtlety of analysis, a searching penetration, a breadth of moral comprehension, in the Frenchmen, which I do not find, nor, in truth, much desire to find, in our countrymen.  A homelier hand does well enough for homelier men.  Nevertheless, such characters as those of Falkland, or Chillingworth, by Clarendon, or Burnet’s very different Lauderdale, are worth a thousand battle-pieces, cabinet plots, or parliamentary combinations, of which we never can be sure that the narrator either knew or has told the whole story.  It is true that these characters have not the strange quality which some one imputed to the writing of Tacitus, that it seems to put the reader himself and the secrets of his own heart into the confessional.  It is in the novel that, in this country, the faculty of observing social man and his peculiarities has found its most popular instrument.  The great novel, not of romance or adventure, but of character and manners, from the mighty Fielding, down, at a long interval, to Thackeray, covers the field that in France is held, and successfully held, against all comers, by her maxim-writers, like La Rochefoucauld, and her character-writers, like La Bruyere.  But the literature of aphorism contains one English