The age began to take a
deep and curious interest in men's lives; biography was written for the
first time and autobiography; it is the great period of memoir-writing
both in England and France; authors like Robert Burton came, whose
delight it was to dig down into human nature in search for oddities and
individualities of disposition; humanity as the great subject of enquiry
for all men, came to its own. All this has a direct bearing on the birth
of the novel. One transient form of literature in the seventeenth
century--the Character--is an ancestor in the direct line. The
collections of them--Earle's _Microcosmography_ is the best--are not
very exciting reading, and they never perhaps quite succeeded in
naturalizing a form borrowed from the later age of Greece, but their
importance in the history of the novel to come is clear. Take them and
add them to the story of adventure--_i.e._, introduce each fresh person
in your plot with a description in the character form, and the step you
have made towards the novel is enormous; you have given to plot which
was already there, the added interest of character.
That, however, was not quite how the thing worked in actual fact. At the
heels of the "Character" came the periodical essay of Addison and
Steele.
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