the Comic Spirit a new habitation, to view these incipient changes as if they had been completed. But we honour him no less as we watch him continuing his pioneer work, and recognize that the amiable manner of its presentation was the most effective possible. On the first birthday of the paper Addison summarizes what was by then beginning to be the joint achievement of himself and Steele. Writing as Mr. Bickerstaff he compares the work, in No. 162, with the Roman censorship. 'He has classified the types of this great country,' the Dappers and the Smarts,' the Pedants and the Men of Fire'; ... he has degraded one species of Men into Bombs, Squibs and Crackers, and another into Drums. . . . It is especially, under such type-names that we find charactersketches in plenty in the Tatler. About one-sixth of the papers can fairly be called 'character-papers,' for though their framework is in the essay-style, their object is to give a description of types in the old way, and, in these papers, set-descriptions could be detached entire from these contexts, and could then be called 'characters.' 'Character '-influence is less evident in the Spectator, for though a fairly long list of characters' could be collected, they are briefer and they hold a subordinate place in its scheme. The different atmosphere of the two papers is clearly indicated by Addison's editorial announcement in No. 249. When I make choice of a Subject that has not been treated of by others, I throw together my Reflections on it without any Order or Method, so that they may appear rather in the Looseness and Freedom of an Essay, than in the Regularity INTRODUCTION xxxiii of a Set Discourse.' Thus in No. 598 mankind is divided into the merry and the serious, but we are not given the portrait of the merry man and the serious man as almost certainly we should have been given them in the Tatler. It is commonly said that the account of Sir Roger is a charactersketch, but it happens that his portrait is one of those presented to us gradually as the story of the Club is told, and we do not find more than three or four lines of consecutive description that could be extracted for a 'character-sketch.' If La Bruyère's influence was evident in the Tatler, it is paramount in the Spectator. Steele and Addison must have found the particularly varied forms which La Bruyère's essays assumed full of suggestion. His truly dispersed' meditations on the manners of the time' are intrinsically as interesting, for their general observations and epigrammatic thought, as are the famous 'characters' which form the illustrations. As these were portraits drawn from life, only thinly veiled under their classical names, they attracted at first additional attention on that account, but the traits selected are such that the portraits have a generic and so a permanent value. The number of portraits of the French kind make the Spectator noteworthy from the 'character' point of view, not as illustrating the 'character,' but as illustrating the replacement of the objective 'character' by the subjective essay'; and it does this at a stage which is specially interesting to the historian, for the transformation is incomplete, and on that account its process is more clearly visible. The history of the character-sketch as a form is. over, for the fashion that embodied the original impulse has been superseded. But we need no other evidence to show that the impulse is not dead than that our contemporaries are expressing it with freshness and point. This anthology has been long in preparation, for it has grown from research on the Character' begun in 1917, but has been delayed by the lengthy and fascinating work required for my Bibliography of English Character-Books, 1608-1700 (Bibliographical Society, 1925), which it seemed desirable to produce first. The index there shows the number of characters to be large, 1430 being contained in 308 editions of character-books of various classes issued in the seventeenth century alone; not all, unfortunately, prove as attractive as their titles. Not many characters could be added before 1600, and after 1700, though such a list would be fairly long, it would be so rambling and indeterminate that its main interest would lie not in the number but in the location of its names. I have found it difficult and exciting to try to give a faithful reprint-with certain exceptions noted later of texts of a time before spelling and punctuation were regularised. Recourse to the invaluable Oxford English Dictionary whenever a spelling seemed unusual most often showed an interesting and dignified history. Not only Miss Daisy Ashford but Lamb and Dickens used 'visiters,' a form that goes back to Wyclif. Occasionally, spellings like 'extravigance' (see pp. 320, 335), though not recorded, prove their right to remain by their repetition in more than one INTRODUCTION XXXV book. Nor is the punctuation as haphazard as it might seem. The diction and punctuation of the seventeenth century can in a real sense be said to have formed a means of expression more delicately adjustable to shades of meaning than the rigid monotony desirable as this is on other grounds— of our practice to-day. This is well known in regard to Shakespeare and Milton, but it is also to be observed in this lighter prose of that time. On page 320, for instance, in the description of the Town-wit' is the following good example of a rhetorical pause, the semicolon after 'vulgar' suggesting a satirical antithesis which without it might be missed: 'By means of some small scraps of learning matcht with a far greater stock of Confidence, a voluble Tongue, and bold delivery, he has the ill-luck to be celebrated by the vulgar; for a man of Parts, which opinion gains credit to his Insolences,...' The semicolon and capitals are used, too, to build up a periodic sentence or paragraph which is sometimes so clearly and rhythmically designed that we cannot consider the modern tendency to use short sentences as entirely a gain. The central paragraph on page 328 is a fair example. Obvious misprints, and one or two words likely to distract the modern reader, have been silently altered, but a list of these changes is given at the end of the index. It is a pleasure to offer my most sincere thanks. for much valuable help to Miss Ethel Seaton, and to Mr. A. I. Ellis, to whom I am specially indebted for his reading of the book in manuscript and proof; to Mr. John Galsworthy |