As for the character-writer’s materials, they are “Human Nature, in its various Forms and Affections.”  Each character should focus on a single vice or virtue, yet since “the Heart of Man is frequently actuated by more Passions than one,” subsidiary traits ought to be included to round out the portrait (e.g., the covetous man may also be impudent, the impudent man generous).  Budgell had expressed a similar conception.  A character, he wrote, “may be compared to a Looking-glass that is placed to catch a particular Object; but cannot represent that Object in its full Light, without giving us a little Landskip of every thing else that lies about it."[4] By Gally’s time writers like Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, and La Bruyere had done much to show the complex and paradoxical nature of human behaviour.  Gally, who praises La Rochefoucauld as the one modern as well equipped as Theophrastus to compose characters, reacts with his age against the stale types which both comedy and the character had been retailing ad nauseam.  Human nature, says Gally, is full of subtle shadings and agreeable variations which the character ought to exploit.  He quotes Temple to the effect that England is richer than any other nation in “original Humours” and wonders that no one has yet attempted a comprehensive portrait-gallery of English personality.  Those writers who have come closest to Gally’s idea of how “humour” ought to be handled are the “great Authors” of the Tatlers and Spectators, with their “interspers’d Characters of Men and Manners compleatly drawn to the Life.”

In admiring the Roger de Coverley sketches, Gally typifies the increasingly tolerant attitude of the Augustans toward eccentric behavior.[5] Like Sterne and Fielding he is delighted by people whose idiosyncracies are harmless and appealing.  As for the harsh satiric animus of a character-writer like Butler, it is totally alien to Gally, who would chide good-naturedly, so as “not to seem to make any Attacks upon the Province of Self-Love” in the reader.  “Each Man,” he writes, “contains a little World within himself, and every Heart is a new World.”  The writer should understand and appreciate, not ridicule, an individual’s uniqueness.

Of course, the character as Theophrastus wrote it described the type, not the particular person.  Gally, who sets up Theophrastus as his model, apparently fails to realize that a “humourist” like Sir Roger verges on individuality.  Indeed, while discussing the need for writers to study their own and other men’s passions, he emphasizes that “without a Knowledge of these Things, ’twill be impossible ever to draw a Character so to the Life, as that it shall hit one Person, and him only.”  Here Gally might well be talking of the Clarendon kind of portrait.  If a character is “one Person, and him only,” he is no longer a type, but somebody peculiarly himself.