the different Manner of representing the same Image.  The Drama presents to the Eyes of a Spectator an Actor, who speaks and acts as the Person, whom he represents, is suppos’d to speak and act in real Life.  The Characteristic Writer introduces, in a descriptive manner, before a Reader, the same Person, as speaking and acting in the same manner.

Section III of Gally’s essay, like Section I thoroughly conventional, is also omitted here.  Gally attributes to Theophrastus the spurious “Proem,” in which Theophrastus, emphasizing his ethical purpose, announces his intention of following up his characters of vice with characters of virtue.  At one point Gally asserts that Theophrastus taught the same doctrine as Aristotle and Plato, but

accommodated Morality to the Taste of the Beau Monde, with all the Embellishments that can please the nice Ears of an intelligent Reader, and with that inoffensive Satir, which corrects the Vices of Men, without making them conceive any Aversion for the Satirist.

It is Gally’s concept of the character as an art-form, however, which is most interesting to the modern scholar.  Gally breaks sharply with earlier character-writers like Overbury who, he thinks, have departed from the Theophrastan method.  Their work for the most part reflects corrupted taste: 

A continued Affectation of far-fetched and quaint Simile’s, which runs thro’ almost all these Characters, makes ’em appear like so many Pieces of mere Grotesque; and the Reader must not expect to find Persons describ’d as they really are, but rather according to what they are thought to be like.

And Gally attacks one of the favorite devices of the seventeenth-century character: 

An Author, in this Kind, must not dwell too long upon one Idea; As soon as the masterly Stroke is given, he must immediately pass on to another Idea....  For if, after the masterly Stroke is given, the Author shou’d, in a paraphrastical Manner, still insist upon the same Idea, the Work will immediately flag, the Character grow languid, and the Person characteris’d will insensibly vanish from the Eyes of the Reader.

One has only to read a character like Butler’s “A Flatterer” to appreciate Gally’s point.  The Theophrastan method had been to describe a character operatively—­that is, through the use of concrete dramatic incident illustrating the particular vice.  The seventeenth-century character is too often merely a showcase for the writer’s wit.  One frequently finds a succession of ingenious metaphors, each redefining from a slightly different angle a type’s master-passion, but blurring rather than sharpening the likeness.

Gally insists that the style of the character be plain and easy, “without any of those Points and Turns, which convey to the Mind nothing but a low and false Wit.”  The piece should not be tediously rambling, but compact.  It must have perfect unity of structure:  each sentence should add a significant detail to the portrait.  The manner ought to be lively, the language pure and unaffected.