The third chapter suggests that The Spectator’s characters set important precedents of diversion, originality and realism for the caricature talk that constituted realist character in the critical recognition and writing of the Romantic novel. The second part of the chapter shows how anti-caricature rhetoric became conventionalised in late eighteenth-century essays that sought to explain and promote the appeal of Addison and Steele’s character ’Sir Roger De Coverley’.