such and such a man will do, is not enough. A
novelist takes a long series of connected actions, and even then he has to
interpret, to review from time to time whole stages of development." All
this is, no doubt, true, but the character-writers differ to a remarkable
extent in their individualising power--some of them achieving a high
degree of success, as is subsequently admitted in the case of Thackeray by
the writer just quoted. It may be noticed too, by the way, that great
novelists are not always equally successful in the character-sketch. One
is reminded of Johnson's phrase about Milton's inability "to carve heads
upon cherry stones" when one thinks of "Theophrastus Such" on the one
hand, and the almost unique position of George Eliot as a novelist on the
other. Less successful as she often is in lightness of touch when she has
to pause and interpret her story, she had not prepared us for such a
complete exhaustion of power as her attempt in this branch of literature
(apparently of the same genus, almost of the same species, as the novel)
reveals to her disappointed admirers. It may, at any rate, be said that
her failure is an instructive lesson in the literary division of labour,
and that these studies require a peculiar delicacy of organisation in the
observer, as well as a special gift of exposition.

"Dolus latet in generalibus" is a salutary warning, but the
character-writers, as a whole, have in most instances got creditably out
of the snare, while Earle, I think, has achieved something more. Besides
his humour and acuteness, besides even his profundity, I find in him an
exceptional power of individualizing. "The contemplative man," for
instance, belongs to a small class at all times; but it is only an
individual we have known, and known at rare intervals, of whose
Wordsworthian temper we are able to say that "Nature asks his approbation
as it were of her works and variety." Again, "the grave divine, who is not
yet dean or canon, though his life is our religion's best apology," reads
throughout like a personal experience. I at least so read it, or I should
not have borrowed from Earle for the dedication which stands at the head
of this preface. Yet such identifications are usually reserved for the
great novelist, whose highest art, as Macaulay says, is to "make the
inventions of one man seem like the recollections of another."

Some of Earle's readers appear to be chiefly impressed with his book as
furnishi