: there is more here than is on the
surface; we see at once Charles, and his court, and Halifax himself.

As a class, the statesmen and politicians more than hold their
own with the other character writers of the seventeenth century.
Shaftesbury's picture of Henry Hastings, a country gentleman of the
old school, who carried well into the Stuart period the habits and
life of Tudor times, shows a side of his varied accomplishments which
has not won the general recognition that it deserves. It is a sketch
exactly in the style of the eighteenth century essayists. It makes us
regret that the fragmentary autobiography in which it is found did not
come down to a time when it could have included sketches of his famous
contemporaries. The literary skill of his grandson, the author of the
_Characteristicks_, was evidently inherited.

Sir Philip Warwick has the misfortune to be overshadowed by Clarendon.
As secretary to Charles I in the year before his execution, and as
a minor government official under Charles II, he was well acquainted
with men and affairs. Burnet describes him as 'an honest but a weak
man', and adds that 'though he pretended to wit and politics, he was
not cut out for that, and least of all for writing of history'. He
could at least write characters. They do not bear the impress of a
strong personality, but they have the fairmindedness and the calm
outlook that spring from a gentle and unassertive nature. His Cromwell
and his Laud are alike greatly to his credit; and the private view
that he gives us of Charles has unmistakable value. His _Memoires_
remained in manuscript till 1701, the year before the publication of
Clarendon's _History_. It was the first book to appear with notable
characters of the men of the Civil Wars and the Protectorate.

The Histories and Memoirs of the seventeenth century contain by far
the greatest number of its characters; but they are to be found also
in scattered Lives, and in the collections of material that mark the
rise of modern English biography. There are disappointingly few by
Fuller. In his _Worthies of England_ he is mainly concerned with the
facts of a man's life, and though, in his own word, he fleshes the
bare skeleton of time, place, and person with pleasant passages,
and interlaces many delightful stories by way of illustrations, and
everywhere holds us by the quaint turns of his fertile fancy, yet the
scheme of the book did not involve the depicting of character, n