The English Essay And Essayists
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE CHARACTER-WRITERS Though Bacon was the founder of a genre, he had no successors of his own sort except Jonson and Selden. The type of essay which came into vogue in the early years of the seventeenth century and remained popular till its close, is an interesting example of fusion. Emphasis is always, and rightly, laid upon its debt to Theophrastus. But it is not sufficient to oint out this alone. We have already seen that the conception of the character as delineated by Theophrastus had been familiar for generations; but nothing came of it until other influences came into play. One of these was the influence of Seneca, to whom attention had been drawn by the rise of the -'-drama. Another was the influence of the dramatists themselves, who both gave to and borrowed from the character- writer
...s. There is a very intimate connexion between Over- bury and Earle on the one hand, and the Jonsonian comedy of humours on the other. They, like Jonson, conceive of virtues and vices as embodied in individual men. Like him they are philosophical, yet their thought as well as his is concrete rather than abstract. The conception of character is analytical, not intuitive. But greatest of all is the debt pi the essayists to Bacon. Not that they either did or could effectively imitate Bacon; they had not sufficient weight. His importance to them lies in the fact that he supplied that which enabled them to copy the model set by Theophrastus? a pattern of a style concise, pointed and sententious. Lastly, it must be noticed that if ever we are entitled to speak of a literary form as answering to something in the spirit of the age wherein it appears, we are so entitled in the case of thecharacter-writers. For they are precisely the prose analogue I of the metaphysica...
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