The age began to take a deep and curious interest in men's lives; biography was written for the first time and autobiography; it is the great period of memoir-writing both in England and France; authors like Robert Burton came, whose delight it was to dig down into human nature in search for oddities and individualities of disposition; humanity as the great subject of enquiry for all men, came to its own.

All this has a direct bearing on the birth of the novel.

One transient form of literature in the seventeenth century--the Character--is an ancestor in the direct line.

The collections of them--Earle's _Microcosmography_ is the best--are not very exciting reading, and they never perhaps quite succeeded in naturalizing a form borrowed from the later age of Greece, but their importance in the history of the novel to come is clear.

Take them and add them to the story of adventure--_i.e._, introduce each fresh person in your plot with a description in the character form, and the step you have made towards the novel is enormous; you have given to plot which was already there, the added interest of character.
That, however, was not quite how the thing worked in actual fact.