Chapter I: Introduction

Henry Gally's _A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings_, here reprinted, is the introductory essay to his translation of _The Moral Characters of Theophrastus_ (1725). Of Gally's life (1696-1769) little is known. Apparently his was a moderately successful ecclesiastical career: he was appointed in 1735 chaplain-in-ordinary to George II. His other published works consist of sermons, religious tracts, and an undistinguished treatise on the pronunciation of Greek.

His essay on the character, however, deserves attention because it is the first detailed and serious discussion by an Englishman of a literary kind immensely popular in its day. English writers before Gally had, of course, commented on the character. Overbury, for example, in "What A Character Is" (_Sir Thomas Overbury His Wife..._ 1616) had defined the character as "wit's descant on any plain-song," and Brathwaite in his Dedication to _Whimzies_(1631) had written that character-writers must shun affectation and prefer the "pith before the rind." Wye Saltonstall in the same year in his Dedicatory Epistle to _Picturae Loquentes_ had required of a character "lively and exact Lineaments" and "fast and loose knots which the ingenious Reader may easily untie." These remarks, however, as also Flecknoe's "Of the Author's Idea of a Character" (_Enigmaticall Characters_, 1658) and Ralph Johnson's "rules" for character-writing in _A Scholar's Guide from the Accidence to the University_ (1665), are fragmentary and oblique. Nor do either of the two English translations of Theophrastus before Gally--the one a rendering of La Bruyère's French version,[1] and the other, Eustace Budgell's _The Moral Characters of Theophrastus_ (1714)--touch more than in passing on the nature of the character. Gally's essay, in which he claims to deduce his critical principles from the practice of Theophrastus, is both historically and intrinsically the most important work of its kind.