If a significant structure of feeling connects English Augustan authors, the best evidence of it should perhaps rest less in shared thematic preoccupations than in common stylistic and formal expressions of a mode of perception and analysis. Looking for a period style, in other words, an observer may hope to fasten on features not primarily decorative and to find a style of experiential construction as well as reconstruction, a style of knowing as well as a manner of speaking. One way of beginning is to study a mode of presenting character that seems peculiar to the period from roughly the 1670s to the 1740s, a kind of character sketch I will call the character progress. The most immediately memorable examples are Hogarth's Harlot's Progress and Rake's Progress and the brilliant series Marriage à la Mode. Literary counterparts to (and possible influences on) these visual progresses are brief narratives, generally in poetic satire where they range from about twenty to over a hundred lines, that portray a character by giving his or her ill-fated career, a career that may run from birth or early adulthood to death, disaster, or an ironic success.