ice. 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.

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 harm