Yet the seventeenth century did not know its richness.  None of its best characters were then printed.  The writers themselves could not have suspected how many others were similarly engaged, so far were they from belonging to a school.  The characters in Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion were too intimate and searching to be published at once, and they remained in manuscript till about thirty years after his death.  In the interval Burnet was drawing the characters in his History of His Own Time.  He, like Clarendon, was not aware of being indebted to any English model.  Throughout the period which they cover there are the characters by Fuller, Sir Philip Warwick, Baxter, Halifax, Shaftesbury, and many others, the Latin characters by Milton, and the verse characters by Dryden.  There is no sign that any of these writers copied another or tried to emulate him.  Together, but with no sense of their community, they made the seventeenth century the great age of the character in England.

I. The Beginnings.

The art of literary portraiture in the seventeenth century developed with the effort to improve the writing of history.  Its first and at all times its chief purpose in England was to show to later ages what kind of men had directed the affairs and shaped the fortunes of the nation.  In France it was to be practised as a mere pastime; to sketch well-known figures in society, or to sketch oneself, was for some years the fashionable occupation of the salons.  In England the character never wholly lost the qualities of its origin.  It might be used on occasion as a record of affection, or as a weapon of political satire; but our chief character writers are our historians.  At the beginning of the seventeenth century England was recognized to be deficient in historical writings.  Poetry looked back to Chaucer as its father, was proud of its long tradition, and had proved its right to sing the glories of Elizabeth’s reign.  The drama, in the full vigour of its youth, challenged comparison with the drama of Greece and Rome.  Prose was conscious of its power in exposition and controversy.  But in every review of our literature’s great achievement and greater promise there was one cause of serious misgivings.  England could not yet rank with other countries in its histories.  Many large volumes had been printed, some of them containing matter that is invaluable to the modern student, but there was no single work that was thought to be worthy of England’s greatness.  The prevailing type was still the chronicle.  Even Camden, ‘the glory and light of the kingdom’, as Ben Jonson called him, was an antiquary, a collector, and an annalist.  History had yet to be practised as one of the great literary arts.