The Augustan Reprint Society


HENRY GALLY

A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings
from his translation of
The Moral Characters of Theophrastus
(1725)




With an Introduction by
Alexander H. Chorney


Publication Number 33




Los Angeles
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
University of California
1952

GENERAL EDITORS

H. Richard Archer, Clark Memorial Library
Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan
Robert S. Kinsman, University of California, Los Angeles
John Loftis, University of California, Los Angeles


ASSISTANT EDITOR

W. Earl Britton, University of Michigan


ADVISORY EDITORS

Emmett L. Avery, State College of Washington
Benjamin Boyce, Duke University
Louis Bredvold, University of Michigan
James L. Clifford, Columbia University
Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago
Edward Niles Hooker, University of California, Los Angeles
Louis A. Landa, Princeton University
Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota
Ernest Mossner, University of Texas
James Sutherland, University College, London
H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles


CORRESPONDING SECRETARY

Edna C. Davis, Clark Memorial Library

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.

Section I of Gally's essay, thoroughly conventional in nature, is omitted here. In it Gally, following Casaubon,² theorizes that the character evolved out of Greek Old Comedy. The Augustans saw a close connection between drama and character-writing. Congreve (Dedication to The Way of the World, 1700) thought that the comic dramatist Menander formed his characters on "the observations of Theophrastus, of whom he was a disciple," and Budgell, who termed Theophrastus the father of modern comedy, believed that if some of Theophrastus's characters "were well worked up, and brought upon the British theatre, they could not fail of Success."³ Gally similarly held that a dramatic character and Theophrastan character differ only in

the different Manner of representing the same Image. The Drama presents to the Eyes of a Spectator an Actor, who speaks and acts as the Person, whom he represents, is suppos'd to