Gally, then, is not as Theophrastan as he professes to be.  True, he harks back to Theophrastus in matters of style and technique.  And he does not criticize him, as does La Bruyere,[6] for paying too much attention to a man’s external actions, and not enough to his “Thoughts, Sentiments, and Inclinations.”  Nevertheless his mind is receptive to the kind of individuated characterization soon to distinguish the mid-eighteenth century novel.  The type is still his measuring-stick, but he calibrates it far less rigidly than a Rymer analyzing Iago or Evadne.  A man can be A Flatterer or A Blunt Man and still retain a private identity:  this private identity Gally recognizes as important.  Gally’s essay thus reflects fundamental changes in the English attitude toward human nature and its literary representation.

Alexander H. Chorney
Fellow, Clark Library
Los Angeles, California

  Notes to the Introduction

  1. The Characters, Or The Manners of the Age.  By Monsieur De La
  Bruyere of the French Academy.  Made English by several hands.  With the
  Characters of Theophrastus... 1699. 2 vols.

  2.  Isaac Casaubon’s Latin edition of Theophrastus appeared in 1592 and
  was reprinted frequently during the seventeenth century.

  3.  Eustace Budgell, The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1714),
  Preface, sig. a5.

  4. Ibid., sig. a6 verso.

5.  For a full account of the shift in attitude see Edward Miles
Hooker, “Humour in the Age of Pope,” Huntington Library Quarterly,
XL (1948), 361-385.

6.  “A Prefatory Discourse concerning Theophrastus,” in The
Characters, Or The Manners of the Age, II, xxii.

* * * * *

The
Moral Characters
of

THEOPHRASTUS.

Translated from
The Greek, with Notes. 
To which is prefix’d

A
CRITICAL ESSAY
on
Characteristic-Writings.

By Henry Gally, M.A.  Lecturer of
St. Paul’s Covent-Garden, and
Rector of Wanden in Buckinghamshire.

Respicere exemplar vitae morumque jubebo
Doctum imitatorem, & vivas hinc ducere voces. 
Hor. in Art.  Poet.

LONDON: 
Printed for John Hooke, at the Flower-
de-luce over-against St. Dunstan’s Church in
Fleet-street.  MDCCXXV.

* * * * *

THE

PREFACE.

The following Papers, which I now commit to the Public, have lain by me unregarded these many Years.  They were first undertaken at the Request of a Person, who at present shall be nameless.  Since that Time I have been wholly diverted from Studies of this Nature, and my Thoughts have been employed about Subjects of a much greater Consequence, and more agreeable to my Profession:  Insomuch, that I had nothing in my Mind less than the Publication of these Papers; but some Friends, who had perus’d them, were of Opinion, that they deserv’d to be publish’d, and that they might afford an agreeable Entertainment not without some Profit to the Reader. These Motives prevailed upon me to give them a second Care, and to bestow upon them so much Pains, as was necessary to put them in that State, in which they now appear.