Chapter III: Elizabethan Times (3)

Some other kinds of writing soften the transition to Restoration prose. The vast catalogue of Characters numbers hundreds of titles. Deriving from Theophrastus, who was edited by Casaubon in 1592, they are yet another Renaissance form that England shared with France. But in English hands, failing a La Bruyere--in Hall's, in Overbury's, even in those of the gay and skilful Earle (_Microcosmographie_, 1628)--the Character is a mere list of the attributes and oddities of a type or calling. It is to the Jonsonian drama of humours what the Pensee, or detached remark, practised by Bishop Hall and later by Butler and Halifax, is to the Essay. These works tended long to be commonplace or didactic, as the popular _Resolves_ of Owen Feltham shows. Cowley was the first essayist to come down from the desk and talk as to his equals in easy phrases of middle length. A time of dissension was not the best for this kind of peaceful, detached writing. The letters of James Howell, the autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and the memoirs of Kenelm Digby belong rather to the older and more mannered than to the more modern form, though Howell's English is in the plainer and quicker movement.