Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/246

226 drawn. A Child, A Grave Divine, A Young Raw Preacher, A Discontented Man, A Downright Scholar, are good examples of his range—poetic, dignified, satiric, and humorous. His Antiquary, compared with Scott's Jonathan Oldbuck, shows the limitations of the author's sympathies, and also of the kind. The abstract character at its best will not bear comparison with the concreter creations of the later essay and novel.

Analysis of character and criticism of life connect the Characters with the pamphlet literature of the later sixteenth century, and with the comedy of Jonson and Middleton. They connect them also with such works as the Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) of Robert Burton (1577-1639), whose life was spent in omnivorous reading at Christ Church, Oxford. The novel had not yet appeared to absorb all this critical tendency, which has a much more legitimate outlet in prose than poetry. Accordingly we find it abounding in works that are, or profess to be, scientific, and which show distinctly the influence of the great essayist and informal critic of life Montaigne. A more extraordinary book than the Anatomy of Melancholy is hardly to be found. It has a plan, although Sterne learned from it, as well as from Rabelais, the art of digression which he used to such remarkable effect in Tristram Shandy. Burton's object is to analyse, describe in its effects, and prescribe