defence of
the portrait cites Suetonius and Plutarch, and Horace and Montaigne,
but also states frankly the true original of the new fashion--'il faut
avouer que nous sommes tres redevables au _Cyrus_ et a la _Clelie_
qui nous en ont fourni les modeles.' About the same time Antoine
Baudeau, sieur de Somaize, brought out his _Grand Dictionnaire des
Precieuses_,[13] in which there are many portraits in the accepted
manner. The portrait was more than a fashion at this time in France;
it was the rage. It therefore invited the satirists. Moliere has a
passing jest at them in his _Precieuses Ridicules_;[14] Charles Sorel
published his _Description de I'isle de la Portraiture et de la ville
des Portraits_; and Boileau wrote his _Heros de Roman_.

The effects of all this in England are certainly not obvious. It is
quite a tenable view that the English characters would have been
no less numerous, nor in any way different in quality, had every
Englishman been ignorant of French. But the _memoires_ and romances
were well known, and it was after 1660 that the art of the character
attained its fullest excellence. The literary career of Clarendon
poses the question in a simple form. Most of his characters, and the
best as a whole, were written at Montpelier towards the close of
his life. Did he find in French literature an incentive to indulge
and perfect his natural bent? Yet there can be no conclusive answer
to those who find a sufficient explanation in the leisure of these
unhappy years, and in the solace that comes to chiefs out of war
and statesmen out of place in ruminating on their experiences and
impressions.

* * * * *

Something may have been learned also from the other kind of character
that is found at its best in modern literature in the seventeenth
century, the character derived from Theophrastus, and depicting not
the individual but the type. In France, the one kind led on to the
other. The romances of Scudery prepared the way for the _Caracteres ou
les Moeurs de ce Siecle_ of La Bruyere. When the fashionable portrait
of particular persons fell out of favour, there arose in its place the
description of dispositions and temperaments; and in the hands of La
Bruyere 'the manners of the century' were the habits and varieties
of human nature. In England the two kinds existed side by side. They
correspond to the two methods of the drama. Begin with the individual,
but draw him in such a way