tion throughout the century.

A significant phase of Mrs. Manley's discussion is the emphasis upon
individual characterization and, in characters, upon not only the
"predominant Quality" and ruling passion of each but also upon the
elusive and surprising "Turnings and Motions of Humane
Understanding." Here one should recognize the influence of
historical writing rather than of poetry. As Rene Rapin had made
clear in Chapter XX of his _Instructions for History_ (J. Davies's
translation, 1680), the historian writes the best portraits who
finds the "essential and distinctive lines" of a man's character and
the "secret motions and inclinations of [his] Heart." But Mrs.
Manley's remarks go beyond Rapin's in implying faith in a sort of
scientific psychology, especially of "the passions." Other writers
showed the same interest and worked toward the same end. Thus Henry
Gally in his essay on Theophrastus and the Character was so carried
away by a notion of the importance of the Character-writer's knowing
all about the passions that he allowed himself to say that only by
such a knowledge could a Character be made to "hit one Person, and
him only"[6]--the goal obviously not of the Character-writer but of
the historian and the novelist. The authors of _The Cry_[7] (1754)
regarded the unfolding of "the labyrinths of the human mind" as an
arduous but necessary task; indeed they went on to declare that the
"motives to actions, and the inward turns of mind, seem in our
opinion more necessary to be known than the actions themselves." It
was Fielding's refusal, in spite of the titles of his books, to
write like an historian with highly individualized and psychological
characterizations that caused his admirer Arthur Murphy to admit in
his "Essay" on Fielding that "Fielding was more attached to the
_manners_ than to the _heart_."[8] He thought Fielding inferior to
Marivaux in revealing the heart just as Johnson, according to
Boswell, preferred Richardson to Fielding because the former
presented "characters of nature" whereas the latter created only
"characters of manners." The author of "A Short Discourse on Novel
Writing" prefixed to _Constantia; or, A True Picture of Human Life_
(1751) went so far as to say that prose fiction may teach more about
the "sources, symptoms, and inevitable consequences" of the passions
than could easily be taught in any other way. The increasingly
subjective and individualized characterization in English f