There are no characters in Aubrey’s Brief Lives, which are only a series of rough jottings by a prince of gossips, who collected what he could and put it all on paper ‘tumultuarily’.  But the extracts from what he says of Hobbes and Milton may be considered as notes for a character, details that awaited a greater artist than Aubrey was to work them into a picture; and if Hobbes and Milton are to be given a place, as somehow or other they must be, in a collection of the kind that this volume offers, there is no option but to be content with such notes, for there is no set character of either of them.  The value of the facts which Aubrey has preserved is shown by the use made of them by all subsequent biographers, and notably by Anthony a Wood, whose Athenae Oxonienses is our first great biographical dictionary.

Lives of English men of letters begin in the seventeenth century, and from Rawley’s Life of Bacon, Sprat’s Life of Cowley, and the anonymous Life of Fuller it is possible to extract passages which are in effect characters.  But Walton’s Lives, the best of all seventeenth century Lives, refuse to yield any section, for each of them is all of a piece; they are from beginning to end continuous character studies, revealing qualities of head and heart in their affectionate record of fact and circumstance.  There is therefore nothing in this volume from his Life of Donne or his Life of Herbert.  As a rule the characters that can be extracted from Lives are much inferior to the clearly defined characters that are inserted in Histories.  The focus is not the same.  When an author after dealing with a man’s career sums up his mental and moral qualities in a section by itself, he does not trust to it alone to convey the total impression.  He is too liable also to panegyric, like Rawley, who could see no fault in his master Bacon, or Sprat who, in Johnson’s words, produced a funeral oration on Cowley.  There are no characters of scholars or poets so good as Clarendon’s Hales, or Earle, or Chillingworth, or Waller; and for this reason, that Clarendon envisages them, not as scholars or poets but as men, and gains a definite and complete effect within small compass.

Roger North made his life of his brother Lord Keeper Guilford an account of the bench and bar under Charles II and James II.  Of its many sketches of lawyers whom he or his brother had known, none is so perfect in every way as the character of Chief Justice Saunders, a remarkable man in real life who still lives in North’s pages with all his eccentricities.  North writes at length about his brother, yet nowhere do we see and understand him so clearly as we see and understand Saunders.  The truth is that a life and a character have different objects and methods and do not readily combine.  It is only a small admixture of biography that a character will endure.  And with the steady development of biography the character declined.