Copyright )J^. COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. THE ENGLISH FAMILIAR ESSAY REPRESENTATIVE TEXTS EDITED, WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY WILLIAM FRANK BRYAN, Ph.D. AND RONALD Sr CRANE, Ph.D. OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH OF NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY GINN AND COMPANY BOSTON . NEW YORK • CHICAGO • LONDON ATLANTA • DALLAS • COLUMBUS • SAN FRANCISCO COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY WILLIAM FRANK BRYAN AND RONALD S. CRANE ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 316. 1 »» JtH^ GINN AND COMPANY • PRO- PRIETORS • BOSTON 'U.S.A. B 10.13^6,^ arjLA41 PREFACE Probably no one will undertake to controvert the statement that a definition of the essay has not yet been made both inclusive enough to cover all the different kinds of prose to which the name has been given and still sufficiently restrictive to mark out any particular quali- ties which distinguish the essay from any other comparatively brief composition. An attempt to discover the characteristics common to Locke's " Essay on the Human Understanding," Lamb's " Dissertation on Roast Pig," Macaulay's '' Warren Hastings," Carlyle's " Essay on Burns," and Arnold's "Sweetness and Light" would pretty surely (demonstrate that these various pieces of literature do not belong to any "single, unified genre. There are, however, a large number of writings :ommonly called " essays " which have traditionally been felt to consti- ute a distinct type. These are characterized by a personal, confidential ittitude of the writers toward their subjects and their readers, by an nformal, familiar style, and by a concern with everyday manners and norals or with individual emotions and experiences rather than with > U'lic affairs or the material of systematic thinking. It is with the •ssay of this more narrowly limited type — perhaps best called the 'amiliar Essay — that the present volume is exclusively concerned. In treating the Familiar Essay the editors have designed not to /"arnish models for a course in English composition or to compile an anthology, but to present such a selection of texts as will exhibit clearly the development of the genre in England. The complete ac- C'-jmplishment of this purpose has made it necessary, of course, to begin outside of England with Montaigne, the originator of the type, and to include specimens of his essays. A similar consideration has led to the inclusion of a brief extract from La Bruyere. But with these exceptions only British writers are represented. However delightful or stimulating are the essays of Irving and Emerson and Lowell, they have not affected the development of the type ; and regard for unity of purpose, combined with lack of space, compels their exclusion. Further, instead of presenting one or two essays each by a great iii iv THE ENGLISH FAMILIAR ESSAY number of writers, the collection is confined to the works of the most significant and influential essayists, in the belief that an adequate representation of their work is the truest way of making clear the evolution of the type. The selection of the individual essays, however, has been made with as much regard to their intrinsic interest and charm as to their historical significance. As this collection is prepared not for the scholar-specialist but for the general reader and the college undergraduate, the spelling and the punctuation have been revised wherever adherence to earlier usage would baffle or seriously annoy the reader. The essays of the seven- teenth and the eighteenth centuries have been modernized to this extent ; those of the nineteenth century, in this respect, have been left almost wholly untouched. In every case the texts of the essays are those of standard editions, and they have been carefully collated wherever collation has seemed advisable. The introduction tries to present in the briefest possible com^ ^ an ordered account of the historical development of the Fami Essay in England ; and for this sketch especial effort has been ma to secure accuracy in matters of both fact and inference. For l section on Montaigne, and Bacon's relationship to Montaigne, 1 editors are deeply indebted to the careful and illuminating monograp of M. Pierre Villey; their obligations to other studies of the vai ;<- essayists, though very considerable, do not demand here such [y,- ticularization. A large part of the material for the introduction th / have gathered from the original sources. The notes, it is hoped, will contribute directly to an intelligent ;p- preciation of the text. Quotations and allusions have been definitely placed, in order to throw light upon the extent and the character of the reading of the various essayists ; and wherever it has appeared that an explanation or a statement of fact would really be of servivfe to the reader, a note has been supplied. The notes, though full, are not compendiums of general information, but each concerns immedi- ately the passage in the text to which it is related. All foreign words and phrases have been translated ; the meaning of an English word, however, has been given only when the word is used in a sense not made clear in the sort of dictionary presumably owned by any person who wishes to read intelligently. The bibliographical essay, like the notes, is intended to be of practical utility to the general student and PREFACE V reader. It includes the titles of only the most notable complete edi- tions, of the most satisfactory inexpensive editions of the essays or of selections from them, and of a small number of studies which contain pertinent and valuable information on the development of the type or on the individual essayists, or which will be of definite assistance to the reader who desires fuller information than he can obtain from the necessarily compacted introduction and notes of this volume. Throughout this work both editors have collaborated closely, and both are equally responsible for selection and arrangement ; but each acknowledges a more definite accountability for certain sections. The preparation of the text for the seventeenth and the eighteenth cen- turies, with the accompanying notes and the corresponding section of the introduction, is the work of Dr. Crane ; for the material of the nineteenth century Dr. Bryan is similarly responsible. The editors desire to acknowledge gratefully their obligations to Charles Scribner's Sons for permission to reprint Stevenson's ''The Lantern Bearers," and to the Newberry Library and the libraries of Harvard University and of Northwestern University for services that have made the work possible. To their former colleague, Mr. Herbert K. Stone, now of the University of Illinois, and to their present col- leagues and friends. Professor Keith Preston, Messrs. George B. Denton, J. B. McKinney, and Arthur H. Nethercot, they desire also to express their appreciation of assistance generously given. Almost every page of the introduction owes something to Mr. Denton's keen and thoughtful criticism. W. F. B. EvANSTON, Illinois R. S. C. CONTENTS! PAGE A History of the English Familiar Essay I. Montaigne and the Beginnings of the Essay in England . . . xi II. The Periodical Essay of the Eighteenth Century .... xxiv III. The New Magazine Essay of the Nineteenth Century . . . xli Michel de Montaigne The Author to the Reader i Of Sorrow 2 Of Repentance 5 Sir Francis Bacon Of Studies 22 Of Empire 24 Of Truth 30 Of Death , 32 Of Adversity 34 Of Envy 35 Of Travel 39 Of Friendship .42 Of Plantations 48 / Of Gardens 51 Abraham Cowley The Dangers of an Honest Man in Much Company 58 Of Myself 63 Seventeenth Century Characters A Mere Young Gentleman of the University .... Earle 69 A Contemplative Man Earle 70 [The Character of Arrias] La Bruyere 70 The Tatler No. I. [Prospectus] Steele 73 No. 29. [On Duelling] Steele 75 ^ Titles of essays in brackets have been supplied by the editors. vii ■ Vlll THE ENGLISH FAMILIAR ESSAY No. 95. [Happy Marriage] Steele No. 132. [The Club at the Trumpet] Steele No. 158. [The Character of Tom Folio] .... Addison No. 181. [Recollections] Steele No. 230. [False Refinements in Style] . . . Steele and Swift No. 244. [On Conversation] Steele The Spectator No. I. No. 2. No. 7. No. 10 No. 23 No. 26 No. 49 No. 50 No. 66 No. 106 No. 108 No. 123 No. 159 No. 281 No. 323 No. 381 No. 409 No. 422 No. 477 [The Character of Mr. Spectator] . . . Addison [The Spectator Club] Steele [Popular Superstitions] Addison [The Purpose of The Spectator'] .... Addison [Ill-Nature in Satire] Addison [Meditations in Westminster Abbey] . . Addison [Coffee-house Company] Steele [The Journal of the Indian Kings] . . . Addison [The Education of Girls] Steele [Sir Roger de Coverley at Home] . . . Addison [The Character of Will Wimble] .... Addison [The Story of Eudoxus and Leontine] . . Addison [The Vision of Mirza] Addison [A Coquette's Heart] Addison [Clarinda's Journal] Addison [Cheerfulness] Addison [Literary Taste] Addison [On Raillery] Steele [On Gardens] Addison The Rambler Johnson No. 29. [The Folly of Anticipating Misfortunes] No. 42. [The Misery of a Fashionable Lady in the Country] PAGE 82 86 89 93 96 \ 01 05 10 14 17 21 24 28 31 33 37 40 44 48 51 SS 59 63 67 171 175 The Citizen of the World Goldsmith Letter I. [The Chinese Philosopher in England] . . . 180 Letter II. [First Impressions of England] 180 Letter IV. [National Characteristics] 183 Letter LIV. [The Character of Beau Tibbs] 186 Letter LV. [The Character of Beau Tibbs (Continued)] . . . 1 89 Letter LXXVII. [A Visit to a London Silk Merchant] .... 193 CONTENTS ix PAGE Charles Lamb A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People . . 196 Valentine's Day 203 Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago 207 The Two Races of Men 220 Imperfect Sympathies 226 • Dream-Children; a Reverie 235 The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers 239 Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading 247 Modern Gallantry 253 ' Old China 258 Poor Relations 264 The Superannuated Man 271 James Henry Leigh Hunt Autumnal Commencement of Fires 279 Getting Up on Cold Mornings 282 The Old Gentleman 285 Deaths of Little Children 290 Shaking Hands 294 William Hazlitt On Reading Old Books 297 On Going a Journey 31-0 On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth 321 William Makepeace Thackeray Tunbridge Toys 333 On Being Found Out 339 De Finibus 347 Robert Louis Stevenson Walking Tours 357 On Falling in Love 365 The Lantern-Bearers 374 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 387 NOTES 393 A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH FAMILIAR ESSAY I. MONTAIGNE AND THE BEGINNINGS OF THE ESSAY IN ENGLAND The Familiar Essay made its first appearance in England during one of the most crowded and prolific periods of her literary his- tory — the last decade of the sixteenth century. As a distinct type of prose writing it was not native to England, although many of the literary practices out of which it developed were to be found there, as in most of the countries of Europe. The direct stimulus to its cultivation by English writers came from France. In the year 1570 a French gentleman, Michel de Montaigne, gave up his post as a lawyer in Bordeaux and retired to his country . estates, for the purpose, as he himself expressed it, of (1533-1592) : '' living in quiet and reading." In his education and his education tastes Montaigne was a typical cultured Frenchman of and tastes the Renaissance. At the instance of his father, an enthu- siastic admirer of Italian humanism, he was taught Latin before he learned French, and at college he had among his tutors some of the most accomplished classical scholars of the time. His culture conse- quently took on a very pronounced Latin and Italian tinge ; Greek writers he read with difficulty, and by preference in translations ; and his interest in earlier and contemporar^y French literature was limited to a few authors and books, principally in the field of history. Above all, as he grew older he became absorbed in the moral problems which the revival of the literatures and philosophies of antiquity, together with the discovery of America, had brought to the fore all over Europe. It was doubtless to gain more time for reflection on these questions that at the age of thirty-seven he abandoned active life for a quiet existence in his library at Montaigne. He had not been there long before a natural desire to '' preserve his memories " and to *' clarify his reflections " led him to write. xi xii THE ENGLISH FAMILIAR ESSAY The form which his first compositions took was in no sense origi- nal with him. By the middle of the sixteenth century there had come , into existence, in nearly all the countries touched by the / Sources and r i i • i i / character of Renaissance, various types of works designed to make ac-/ his early cessible the knowledge and ideas of antiquity. Some of these had themselves an antique origin. Thus, from ^he so-called Distichs of Cato, a work dating from the late Roman Empire, proceeded a long line of collections of " sentences," or moral m,axims, of which Erasmus's Adagia (1500) was perhaps the most celebrated — books in which were brought together, sometimes u'lder general heads such as ^' education," " the brevity of life," " aeath," " youth and age," " riches," etc., wise sayings of ancient and often, too, of mod- ern authors. Similarly, the influence of Plutarch (born cir. 46 a.d.) and of Valerius Maximus (first century a.d.) led to the compilation of numerous books of apothegms, or " sentences " put into the mouths of historical personages, and of '' examples," or significant anecdotes culled from the writings of historians and moralists. Works of this kind enjoyed an extraordinary vogue during the Renaissance ; they existed in nearly all the modern languages as well as in Latin, and some of them ran through literally hundreds of editions. Strictly speaking, however, they were not so much books as extremely arid compilations of raw material. To supplement them, and to present the wisdom of antiquity in a more readable form, certain humanists developed, chiefly from hints furnished by such ancient authors as Aulus Gellius (2d century a.d.) and Macrobius (5th century a.d.), a special type of writing, commonly called in France the lepn mo7'ale^ in which ** sentences," apothegms, and '* examples " were fused together in short dissertations on ethical subjects. The writers who cultivated this genre, whether in Latin dr in the various vernaculars, had for the most part a purely practical object — to collect and make readily accessible the views and discoveries of the ancients on all questions relating to the conduct of life. They attached themselves by prefer- ence to subjects of a general and commonplace sort, such as strange customs and singular happenings, the grandeur and misery of man, the intelligence of animals, the moral virtues, the force of the imagi- nation, death ; and in treatment they seldom went beyond an imper- sonal, unoriginal grouping of maxims and " examples." \ INTRODUCTION xiii When Montaigne began to write, probably in 1571, it was to the compilers of lemons that he looked for literary inspiration. It was, in- deed, only natural that he should do so ; for his own aims in writing were at first almost precisely the same as theirs. He had no ambition to write an original book ; he wished only to bring together, with a minimum of effort, the interesting and helpful passages which he en- countered in his reading. Accordingly, his first compositions belonged essentially in both manner and matter to the genre which these com- pilers had popularized. Some of them, as, for example, a little piece entitled " That the Hour of Parley is Dangerous," were merely brief collections of anecdotes and " sentences," unified by a common sub- ject ; others, such as " Of the Inequality Amongst Us " and '*' Of Sorrow," ^ had a somewhat more elaborate organization, but were constructed out of the same elements. The subjects, all of them questions of morals or practical affairs, had nearly all been treated already by one or another of the numerous writers of lemons. In dealing with them afresh Montaigne displayed an impersonality of method quite as marked as that of any of his predecessors. Now and then he developed in his own way a maxim from an ancient writer, added a word of comment to one of his numerous moral stories, or contributed a sentence or two of transition ; but beyond that his ambition did not go ; there were no personal confidences, no revelations of his own experience and ideas. Such was the character of the writings with which Montaigne oc- cupied himself during the year or two following his retirement. His His creation subservience to the ideals and methods of the le^on was of the per- complete. About 1574, however, before he had published sona essay anything, a change began in his conception and practice of composition which was to result, before 1580, in the creation of an entirely new literary form — the personal essay. Among the in- fluences which contributed to this change one of the most potent certainly was that of his own temperament. Montaigne had brought into his retirement a strong native tendency to moral reflection and self-analysis — a tendency which his isolation from affairs, and especially a severe illness which he underwent about 1578, no doubt helped to intensify. But there were literary factors also at work. Shortly after 1 See pp. 2-5, below. xiv THE ENGLISH FAMILIAR ESSAY 1572 he fell under the spell of the writings of Plutarch, then lately translated into French by Jacques Amyot. In these, particularly in the collection of short moral discourses known as Moralia, he found models of a very different sort from the dry and impersonal compila- tions He had imitated hitherto. Plutarch's chapters were, it is true, full of maxims and ''examples"; but the maxims and ''examples" did not form the substance of the composition — they were wholly sub- ordinate to the personal reflections of the author. The naturalness and freedom from pedantry of the old Greek moralist made a pro- found impression on Montaigne ; he seems to have had the Moralia almost constantly before him during a period of several years, and their influence had much to do with the transformation of his own methods of composition. This transformation first appeared clearly in a number of pieces written between 1578 and 1580.^ Content no longer with a mere compilation of striking passages from his reading, Montaigne now aimed to give primarily his own reflections on moral and psychological subjects. The quotations and '' examples," it is true, still abounded ; but their function was changed ; they were not, as before, the basis of the composition, but rather simply a means of illustrating the writer's thought. Moreover, to the " examples '' drawn from books Montaigne began now to add anecdotes taken from his own memory and observation. Thus, in a chapter entitled " Of the Education of Children," after setting forth the general principles which should govern in the training of children, he proceeded to give a sketch, full of inti- mate details, of his own education. Again, in the chapter " Of Books" he discoursed not so much of books in general as of his own individ- ual tastes and prejudices in literature. In short, the chapters written during this second period of Montaigne's career tended to become each a tissue of personal reflections, colored, to be sure, but no longer dominated, by their writer's reading. For the most part, too, they were considerably longer than those of the first period, and far less regular and orderly in composition. 2 Especially, " Of the Education of Children," " Of the Affection of Fathers to their Children," " Of Books," " Of Cruelty," " Of Presumption," and " Of the Resemblance of Children to their Fathers." With the exception of the first, all of these pieces are to be found in the second book of the Essais. The first book is almost entirely made up of impersonal essays of Montaigne's earliest period. INTRODUCTION xv In 1580 Montaigne assembled the chapters he had written up to that time — ninety-four in all — and published them at Bordeaux in ,. . two books, entitling; them modestly Essais. The name, a First edition ' i- . ,r . 1 of Mon- new one in European literature, itself gave warning that taigne's ^\^q collection was no mere book of conventional kf07is, but, in however tentative a way, an original work. But Montaigne was not content with this indirect advertisement of his new-found purpose. Forgetful of nearly the whole of the first book, and thinking only of a few chapters in the second, he insisted, in his prefatory epistle to the reader, on the personal character of his undertaking. " It is," he wrote, " myself I portray." Between 1580 and 1588 Montaigne continued to busy himself with his book, and in the latter year brought out a new edition, in Montaigne's which, along with revised versions of the essays written later essays before 1580, he included thirteen entirely new chapters.^ In these last pieces the traits which had been slowly coming to characterize his writing since about 1574 became still more marked. The individual essays were longer; the composition was if anything more rambling and discursive ; and, though the quotations and the "examples" remained, the personal experiences and reflections of the writer formed even more notably the center of the work. Everywhere, no matter what the subject announced at the beginning of the chapter, Montaigne talked of himself — of his memories of youth, of the curi- ous and interesting things which had happened to him in manhood, of his habits of body and mind, of his whims and prejudices, of his ideas. Like the good moralist he was, he took on the whole more interest in what happened within him than in the external events of his life. " I can give no account of my life by my actions," he wrote in the essay " Of Vanity " ; '' fortune has placed them too low ; I must do it by my fancies." But it was not his intention to write anything like a formal autobiography even of his inner life. He wished rather to find in his own experiences, commonplace as many of them were, light on the general moral problems which were always the primary subject of his reflections. " I propose," he said, speaking of his design 3 These formed a third book. Among them were the essays on which Montaigne's fame has perhaps most largely rested : "Of Repentance," " Upon Some Verses of Virgil," " Of Coaches," " Of the Inconvenience of Greatness," " Of Vanity," " Of Experience." xvi THE ENGLISH FAMILIAR ESSAY to picture himself, " a life ordinary and without luster ; 't is all one ; all moral philosophy may as well be applied to a common and private life, as to one of richer composition ; every man carries the entire form of human condition." Such was the philosophical conception which underlay the personal essay as it was finally developed by Montaigne. The Essais, popular from the first in France, were not long in making their way across the Channel into England. In 1595, three The Essais years after Montaigne's death, a copyright was issued for in England an English translation, possibly the one which appeared in 1603. This version was the work of a literary schoolmaster named John Florio. As a representation of the original it was far from faith- ful. It was written, however, in picturesque if somewhat obscure Eng- lish, and it acquired enough popularity in the early seventeenth century to make necessary at least two reprintings. In this translation, or in the original French, the Essais were read by an extensive public, which numbered some of the most eminent names in Elizabethan letters. Under these circumstances it is not strange that the literary genre which Montaigne created — the informal, personal essay — should have become naturalized in England. The first work by an English writer to bear the name of the new form appeared in 1597. Early in that year Francis Bacon, then a , rising lawyer in the service of the queen, published a first essays : small volume entitled Essayes. Religious Meditatiojis. their source Places of perswasion and disswasioji. The ''essayes" in sixtGcntli" century col- were ten in number : " Of Study," " Of Discourse," " Of lections of Ceremonies and Respects," " Of Followers and Friends," ''sentences" ,, ^^ Suitors," '' Of Expense," '' Of Regiment of Health," " Of Honour and Reputation," "Of Faction," and '' Of Negotiating." In reality they were not essays in the Montaigne sense at all, but rather short collections of '' sentences " or aphorisms, of a type which had been familiar throughout Europe during the whole of the sixteenth century. Each piece consisted of a series of brief, pointed maxims relating to the general subject proposed at the beginning ; there was little attempt at order ; and the individual maxims were quite devoid of concrete illustration or development of any kind. Fundamentally Bacon's purpose in writing the book was not to discuss questions of morals or psychology in the light of his own experience in life, but to INTRODUCTION xvii furnish in a condensed, memorable form practical counsel to those ambitious of success in public affairs. Only the title, it would seem, came from Montaigne, and that was doubtless added some time after the book itself was completed. It was not long, however, before essays really of the Montaigne type made their appearance. In two volumes, published in 1600 and Cornwallis's 160 1, Sir William Cornwallis, a friend of Ben Jonson, Essays brought out a collection of fifty-two pieces, for the most part short, dealing with such general themes as resolution, patience, love, glory, ambition, discourse, fame, judgment, sorrow, vanity, for- tune, and the like. Like Montaigne, to whom in several passages of warm praise he acknowledged his debt, Cornwallis wrote his Assays largely in the first person, made abundant illustrative use of "" exam- ples," some from ancient historians and poets, some from his own experience, and in general afforded a rather full revelation of his ideas, tastes, and sentiments. As a result, in part no doubt, of this strong personal note, his book shared during the first third of the seventeenth century not a little of the popularity of its model. The next important occurrence in the history of the new genre in England was the appearance in 161 2 of an enlarged edition of Bacon's ^^^ £ssays of Bacon. From ten in the edition of 1597 the Essays number of chapters had now become thirty-eight. The 1012 ^j.g^ essays were reprinted without fundamental change ; here and there new maxims were added, and some of the old ones given a slight degree of development ; but on the whole their original character remained unaltered. Of the newer essays a few, such as "Of Praise," ''Of Delay," and "Of Fortune," belonged essentially to the old type of " sentences " ; the majority, however, exhibited traits which showed that Bacon's conception of the essay as a form and his own methods of writing were beginning to change. Thus, in many of the pieces there appeared a more marked element of order and com- position ; quotations and " examples," usually very briefly indicated, became an established feature of the exposition ; in a word, the old ideal of a collection of detached maxims began to give place, in Bacon's mind, to that of a more continuous and living discourse. This evolution, clearly apparent in the essays first published in 161 2, became still more pronounced in the final collection which Bacon put forth in 1625. The total number of essays was now xviii THE ENGLISH FAMILIAR ESSAY increased to fifty-eight. Of the old ones nearly all had been subjected to some revision, those of 1612 undergoing the greatest change. Bacon's ^^^ result was a body of writing which differed in sev- Essays eral important features from the Essays of 1597. For ° ^ ^5 one thing, many of the pieces now exhibited something like orderly and planned composition ; instead of merely juxtaposed maxims, there was now, in many cases (as in the essay " Of Friend- ship "), a clear and explicit development by points. The average length also had increased ; many of the new essays covered from six to ten pages. Furthermore, the style was different — without losing its epigrammatic flavor, it was fuller, richer in imagery, more circum- stantial. But the most significant changes were the increase in the number of historical '' examples " and the introduction of a certain amount of personal opinion and reminiscence. Scarcely an essay now but had its illustrations from ancient or modern history ; in some pieces (as, for example, " Of Empire ") they occupied nearly as much space as the general reflections which they served to clarify and illu- minate. Along with them appeared for the first time anecdotes derived from Bacon's own experience in life ; as when, in the essay " Of Prophecies," he reported the '' trivial prophecy, which I heard when I was a child," that " When hempe is sponne, England 's done." More and more, too, he formed the habit of stating his opinions in the first person. Such were some of the differences in form and spirit which sepa- rated Bacon's essays of 1625 from their predecessors of 1597. Sev- Causes of eral influences probably combined to produce the change. the trans- jj^ ^-j^g ^j-g^- pi^ce, one of Bacon's dreams for a number of formation in ... Bacon's years past had been the construction of a science of morals. Essays j^ his Z>e Atiginentis Scientiai'iun (1623) he had proposed as a means to this end the writing of short monographs on each of the passions, virtues, and types of character. He never carried out his design in full ; but it is not unlikely that such essays as those " Of Envy " and " Of Simulation and Dissimulation," which were among the most finished and orderly of the 1625 group, were composed as examples of the monographs he had in view. Another probable influence was that of the Epistles of Seneca (first century A.D.), one of the most widely read of ancient works on morals, a book constantly quoted by Bacon. In a canceled preface to the edition of INTRODUCTION xix 1 612 he had remarked of the title of his own book: "The word is late, but the thing is ancient. For Seneca's Epistles to Lucilius, if one mark them well, are but essays, — that is, dispersed meditations, — though conveyed in the form of epistles." Finally, much of the impetus to the change in his methods of writing, particularly after 161 2, would appear to have come from Montaigne. Montaigne's influence it was, in all likelihood, that led Bacon to cultivate a more picturesque style, to develop his meager aphorisms into connected discourses, to multiply illustrations of all kinds, and — though to a very limited degree — to speak of himself. Yet, in spite of this influence, the type of essay which Bacon devel- oped resembled only superficially that of Montaigne. In form it was Differences shorter^ more compact and orderly, and far less personal ; between the jj^ content it had a practical bias which for the most part Bacon and Montaigne's wanted. From first to last Bacon's purpose Montaigne was to give, from his own extensive knowledge of life and history, sound advice which would profit those whose ambition it was to rise in t he world of courts and council chambers. The title which he prefixed to the edition of 1625 — Essays, or Counsels Civil and Moral — exactly expressed his aim. His book was to be a manual of morality and policy for aspiring courtiers and statesmen. It is true that in the second and third editions he included essays of a more general sort — meditations on truth, death, beauty, friend- ship. But, aside from the fact that even here a certain amount of worldly wisdom crept in, these essays were far less typical of the work as a whole than those which dealt with such themes as the practice of dissimulation, the relative advantage of marriage and single life to public men, the means of rising to great place, the best method of dealing with rebellious subjects, the value of travel in the education of a gentleman, the management of an estate, the causes which make nations great, the best way to govern colonies, the economy of princely buildings and gardens. In short, though almost certainly indebted to Montaigne for a number of characteristic fea- tures, — for the most part, to be sure, features whicli Montaigne de- rived from the writers of lefo?is, — Bacon's Essays really introduced a new and distinct variety of the genre. During the thirty-five years which elapsed between the completion of Bacon's work and the Restoration, several other writers tried their XX THE ENGLISH FAMILIAR ESSAY hands at the familiar essay. With some of these the dominant in- spiration was Bacon, with others Montaigne. Thus Owen Felltham Decline of in his Resolves: Divi?ie, Moral., Political (cir. 1620; a the essay be- second part in 1628) adapted Bacon's later method and tween Bacon , . / . . ,-, -r. • • and the Style to the exposition 01 ideas quite unlike Bacon s in Restoration their emphasis on the religious and devotional side of life ; while Sir Thomas Browne in his Religio Medici (written about 1635, published in 1642) united with a quaint picturesqueness of thought and expression peculiar to himself, not a little of Mon- taigne's characteristic manner of personal revelation. Neither of these writers, however, nor any of their fellows, had any appreciable influence on the development of the essay. They wrote, moreover, at a time when the essay as a type was undergoing a marked eclipse of its earlier popularity. No doubt in part this eclipse was due to the superior attractiveness for the men of this generation of the '^ char- acter " * ; no doubt in part also it reflected the absorption o^ the ablest minds of the period in the political and religious controversies which preceded and accompanied the Civil War. Whatever the causes, an eclipse took place, and it w^as not until the more peaceful days of the Restoration that essay-writing again assumed a place of prominence among the activities of literary Englishmen. In this revival, as in the original introduction of the form, the all- important factor was the influence of Montaigne. After suffering , a temporary obscuration during the period of the Civil the essay War, Montaigne's popularity became greater than ever after the durins: the last forty years of the seventeenth century. Restoration ^^, , ■^ ^ ^ ■ , • • 1, — the influ- I he causes that contributed to this result were principally ence of Mon- two : the greatly increased interest in French literature ^ ^ which characterized the public of the generation after the Restoration, and the appeal which Montaigne made to the growing current of scepticism and free-thought. In 1685 Charles Cotton, a poet and translator, the joint author with Izaak Walton of The Com- pleat Afigler, published a new version of the Essais, which went through three editions by 1700 and completely superseded Florio's now largely obsolete translation. The admirers of Montaigne included some of the most distinguished and influential persons of the age. He was a favorite author of the poet Cowley ; Dryden referred to * See below, p. xxxi. INTRODUCTION xxi him, in the preface to All for Love, as " honest Montaigne " ; he was one of the writers with whom Wycherley, according to his friend Pope, used to " read himself to sleep " ; the Marquis of Halifax confessed that the Essais was " the book in the world I am best entertained with." In this atmosphere of enthusiasm for Mon- taigne the form which he had created began once more to attract English writers. The man who most successfully cultivated the familiar essay in the period after the Restoration was Abraham Gowley. Cowley brought Abraham ^^ ^^^ writing of essays not only a mind stored with the Cowley best classical learning of the day and a sensibility made (I I -1 7) delicate by long practice as a poet, but also a somewhat extensive experience in active affairs. A graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, he was expelled from his fellowship in 1643 by the Puritans, and in 1646 followed the exiled queen of Charles I to France, where he was employed on various Royalist missions until the Restoration. On his return to England he looked confidently for some reward of his services from Charles II. Like many another good Royalist, however, he was disappointed in this expectation, and in 1663 he withdrew completely from public life and finally settled on a small estate in the country secured to him by his patrons the Earl of St. Albans and the Duke of Buckingham. Here he lived until his death in 1667. During the last four or five years of his life he amused himself by composing at intervals a number of short prose essays, each concluding with one or more verse translations from his favorite Roman poets. In them he dwelt on the superior advantages of liberty over dependence, of obscurity over greatness, of agriculture over business, and of a quiet life of reflection in the country over a crowded existence in city or court — all in a familiar style, enlivened by illustrations from his own experience and from the accumulated wisdom of ancient moralists and poets. The eleven essays thus written were published in the 1668 folio of his works under the title of Several Discourses, by Way of Essays, in Verse a7id Prose. Of all the English essayists of the seventeenth century, Cowley was most fully indebted to Montaigne. His interests in life, it is true, were narrower; he had little of Montaigne's spirit of free inquiry and criticism ; he was more restrained in his revelation of himself \ xxii THE ENGLISH FAMILIAR ESSAY his language was less vigorous and picturesque. Nevertheless Mon- taigne — the Montaigne of the later, more personal Essais — was Cowley's in- ^^^ master. He it was who taught him, in large part debtedness to at least, the habit of self-analysis, the trick of weaving Montaigne -^^^^ j^-^ (discourse quotations and anecdotes from ancient writers, the secret of a free, informal composition and of a familiar, colloquial style. Toward the end of the centuiy another lover of Montaigne and of country life made a contribution to the essay almost if not quite as Sir William ^^o^able as that of Cowley. This was Sir William Temple, Temple perhaps best known to the public of his time as an astute (1628-1699) diplomat, the chief promoter of that Triple Alliance which united Holland, Denmark, and England against the growing power of Louis XIV. In intervals of official business, and especially during several periods of enforced retirement from public life, Temple was accustomed to spend his time on his country estate in Surrey. Here he cultivated his garden, cared for his fruit trees, which were famous throughout Europe, and diverted himself by setting down his thoughts on various subjects in the form of loosely organized essays modeled more or less closely on those of Montaigne. Sometimes his themes were literary, as in the discourses '' Upon the Ancient and Modem Learning " and " Of Poetry." More frequently, however, they were suggested by his experiences and reflections as a country gentleman upon his estate, as when he wrote of the cure of the gout, of garden- ing, of health and long life, of conversation. These essays, composed at different times between the late seventies and Temple's death in 1699, were published in three volumes, entitled Miscellanea, in 1680, 1690, and 1 70 1. If Cowley and Temple were the most important essayists of the last forty years of the seventeenth century, they were by no means Other essay- the only ones. George Savile (Marquis of Halifax), John ists contem- Sheffield (Duke of Buckingham), Charles Blount, Joseph porary with ^, .„ J^ ^ ^^. ^^ ^ Cowley and Glanvill, Jeremy Comer — all these men m various ways Temple carried on the traditions of Montaigne or of Bacon. As they initiated, however, no new departures in essay-writing, and had little influence on succeeding essayists, their activity was of small significance in the evolution of the type. With their passing, the first stage in the history of the essay in INTRODUCTION xxiii England came to a close. It was a stage characterized not so much by abundant and varied production or widespread popularity as by General char- experimentation on rather narrow lines. The great models acterofthe Qf ^-j^g genre, the writers whose methods and spirit ani- seventeenth mated the work of the lesser men, were Montaigne and century Bacon — the one presenting an ideal of frank and lively ) ., self-portraiture, the other inspiring to a concise and sententious, if^r somewhat impersonal, handling of general ideas. The influence of both men coincided on at least two points : with both of them, and consequently with all of their followers during the seventeenth century, the essay was primarily concerned with problems of moral- ity, in the large sense of the word ; and it treated these problems for the most part in the light of classical example and precept, or at least in the spirit of classical ethical reflection. " An Essay," wrote a certain Ralph Johnson in 1665, ''is a short discourse about any virtue, vice, or other commonplace." He might have added that the virtues and vices with which the essayists dealt were essentially individual virtues and vices — it was morality from the individual's point of view and in the individual's interest, and not from the point of view of society, that formed the burden of their reflections. The multifarious aspects of social life — manners, customs, institutions — interested them but slightly if at all. Of course in this they wrote but as children of their age. The period of the sixteenth and seven- teenth centuries, dominated still by the intellectual tendencies of the Renaissance, was in its thinking on ethical questions an age of pronounced individualism. Little wonder then that Montaigne and Bacon and their disciples fixed their attention chiefly, if not altogether, on the cultivation and expression of personality. Equally represent- ative of the culture of the time were the drafts which all of the essayists made upon ancient literature for aphorism and illustration. The abundance of " sentences " and '' examples " derived from Greek and especially Latin sources, the frequency of allusions to classical poets, moralists, and historians, the general disposition to find in ancient civilization and literature guidance for modern times — all these things clearly reflected the humanism out of which the essay originally developed and which still survived in cultured circles to the end of the seventeenth century. xxiv THE ENGLISH FAMILIAR ESSAY II. THE PERIODICAL ESSAY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Shortly after 1700 a new period opened in the history of the Eng- lish familiar essay. During the preceding hundred years the essay had Increased been essentially a minor form ; it had been neglected by prominence niost of the prominent writers, and cultivated by those and changed character who did attempt it only m their moments of leisure from of the essay more serious writing ; its public had been small and select, eighteenth Now, however, it took its place among the three or four century most important and widely popular literary types. Scarcely one of the great writers of the period, from Addison and Pope to Dr. Johnson and Goldsmith, but concerned himself with it at one time or another ; and its readers included Englishmen of all classes and tastes. Moreover, along with this rise in prominence, there took place a notable change in its aim and spirit. Whereas in the seven- teenth century the essay had been almost universally conceived as an informal, more or less personal, discourse on some phase of individual morality, it now became oriented definitely toward the analysis and criticism of contemporary social life. Stylistic changes, too, accom- panied these modifications in substance ; new methods of composition, new devices of exposition appeared alongside the old ; with the result that the essay of the eighteenth century constituted in many respects an entirely new literary type. This type was the joint creation of two men, Richard Steele (1672- 1729) and Joseph Addison (1672-17 19), and as such it bore in unmistakable manner the impress of their personalities. However, as neither Steele nor Addison could escape the influence of their environment, the particular form and direction which they gave to the essay were in large measure determined by external conditions. Among these conditions none was of greater moment in shaping the essay in the eighteenth century than the development of literary Influences on periodicals. During the years immediately following the the new Revolution of 1688, when, under the stimulus of an essay: the aroused interest in politics and a relaxed censorship, rise or ^ '■ literary newspapers in the strict sense of the word began to periodicals appear in considerable numbers, certain persons con- ceived the idea of publishing journals that should deal, not primarily with news, but with some of the numerous miscellaneous matters of INTRODUCTION xxv fashions, literature, and morals that engaged the attention of the public. One of these persons, a bookseller named John Dunton, The Athe- began in 1691 to print a sheet which he called at first nian Mercury The Atheniaii Gazette and later The Athenian Mercu?y. (1691-1697) -j^g ^^^ ^Y\Q j^gj^ l-]-^^^ }^g associated with him in writing it aimed to furnish instruction mingled with entertainment. Their characteristic device was questions and answers ; they invited queries on all manner of subjects from their readers and undertook to reply to them in their paper. Thus, in one number they discussed the question '^ whether the torments of the damned are visible to the saints in heaven," and vice versa. But not all their space was de- voted to merely curious matters like this. Even more frequently they were called upon to supply useful information regarding history or natural science, to pronounce upon questions of taste, or to resolve nice problems of conduct and manners. Dunton continued to publish the Athenian Mercury for six years. It was the first journal of a miscellaneous character, not primarily concerned with politics, that England had seen. It was followed, after an interval, by others. Of these by far the most important and successful was A Weekly Revieiv of the Affairs Defoe's of France^ published between 1704 and 17 13 by Daniel Review Defoe. Defoe's primary object in issuing the Review was (1704-1713) |.Q pj-ovide himself with a medium through which he could express his opinions on public affairs, particularly on the struggle then going on with France, and on the progress of English trade. Each number, therefore, contained an essay from his pen on one or the other of these subjects. But he was too shrewd a man of business, and too well acquainted with the tastes of his readers, to confine himself to the serious matters of politics. ^' When I first found the design of this paper," he wrote in one of his prefaces, ''. . . I con- sidered it would be a thing very historical, very long, and though it could be much better performed than ever I was like to do it, this age had such a natural aversion to a solemn and tedious affair that, however profitable, it would never be diverting, and the world would never read it. To get over this difficulty that secret hand, I make no doubt, that directed this birth into the world dictated to make some sort of entertainment or amusement at the end of each paper, upon the immediate subject then on the tongues of the Town, which inno- cent diversion would hand on the more weighty and serious part of xxvi THE ENGLISH FAMILIAR ESSAY the design into the heads and thoughts of those to whom it might be useful." This " entertaining part," which Defoe hoped would make readers for his more serious reflections, he called " Mercure Scandale : or. Advice from the Scandalous Club." It consisted of short discourses on questions of fashions, manners, morals, taste, and the like, purport- ing to be written by the members of the " Scandalous Club," usually in answer to inquiries sent to them from readers. For about a year it was published regularly in the Review ; then, on account of a press of other matter, it was taken out and issued separately, under the title of The Little Revieiv ; presently it was discontinued altogether. These journals were important in that they established in England the tradition of the literary or miscellaneous periodical. (^Of direct in- fluence upon the essay, however, they exerted but little. Neither the AtheJiian Mercury nor Defoe's Review had much to do with deter- mining the character of this genre as it was written in the eighteenth century. That role was reserved for two papers which followed shortly upon them, appealed to the same general interests, and profited by the taste which they had helped to create. On April 12, 1709, while the Review was still coming out, there appeared the first number of a new journal. The Tatler. In external The Tatler form it consisted of a single folio sheet printed on both (1709-1711) sides ; and a prospectus at the beginning announced that it would be published on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, " for the convenience of the post." At first the name of the editor was not known. But it was presently whispered about that he was Richard Steele, a writer and politician of strong Whig sympathies, who at the time was editor of the official government newspaper. The London Gazette. As Gazetteer, Steele had access to the latest news, especially of foreign affairs — to a great deal, moreover, that he could not use in the Gazette itself. This circumstance, combined with the recent success of Defoe's " Scandalous Club," had given him the idea of publishing a journal of his own that should be at once a newspaper and a collection of essays "on miscellaneous subjects. For various reasons he did not wish his own name to appear as editor. He there- fore announced the Tatler as the work of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., a benevolent astrologer in whose name Swift had diverted the town in a humorous pamphlet controversy of the previous year. The prospectus in the first number announced that the Tatler was INTRODUCTION xxvii to consist of two parts — accounts of news and essays. For a time this program was carried out. Until October, 1709, the numbers of the paper regularly contained, under the heading of St. James Coffee-house, a paragraph of foreign news condensed from the latest dispatches from the Continent. After No. 80 (October 13, 1709), however, this disappeared as a regular feature and reappeared only occasionally thereafter. The essays also appeared from the first. In the beginning they were as a rule short, and each number contained several. ' Thus in No. 5 there was a discourse on love, a notice of a new book, a story of two brave English soldiers, besides several para- graphs of news. As time went on, the length of the essays was in- creased, and the number ultimately reduced to one to each issue ; when the Tatler was discontinued, this had become the usual practice. Steele began his periodical entirely by himself ; the plan was his, and he wrote the first few numbers without any assistance. With No. 18, however, he began to receive help from an old school friend and fellow Whig, Joseph Addison, then under-secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Addison wrote for the Tatler off and on until its with- drawal, contributing in all some forty-one papers and parts of thirty- four others, a litde over a third of the total number. At no time did he become a dominant influence in the journal. The Tatler continued to appear for twenty-one months. Finally, on the 2d of January, 17 11, it was suddenly withdrawn, greatly to the regret of the large public which had come to welcome its half- humorous, half-satirical comment on the life of the day. " Everyone," wrote the poet Gay, " wanted so agreeable an amusement, and the coffee-houses began to be sensible that the Esquire's Lucubrations alone had brought them more customers than all other newspapers put together." It was not long, however, before a new periodical took its place. On March i, 17 11, two months after the cessation of the Tatler, appeared the first number of the Spectator, The new paper resembled j^g the Tatler in external form, but, unlike the Tatler, it was , Spectator published daily, and at no time contained news. A single (1711-1712) essay, headed by a Latin or Greek motto, and followed by a group of advertisements, made up the contents of each number. The editor was announced to be a silent but very observing man named Mr. Spectator, who was assisted in his conduct of the paper xxviii THE ENGLISH FAMILIAR ESSAY by a club composed of an old country knight, a lawyer, a merchant, a soldier, a man of the world, and a clergyman. The general editorial charge of the new periodical was in the hands of Steele. Addison was a very frequent contributor, and indeed wrote more essays than his friend ; his assistance extended also to the general design of the work. A few other persons, such as Addison's cousin Eustace Budgell, John Hughes, Henry Grove, and Henry Martin, contributed papers occasionally. The audience which the Spedatoi' was designed to reach was a diversified one. It included persons of quality, students and profes- sional men, merchants of the City, and, above all, women. " I take it for a particular happiness," wrote Steele in No. 4, '^ that I have always had an easy and familiar admittance to the fair sex ... As these compose half the world, and are, by the just complaisance and gallantry of our nation, the more powerful part of our people, I shall dedicate a considerable share of these my speculations to their serv- ice, and shall lead the young through all the becoming duties of virginity, marriage, and widowhood ... In a word, I shall take it for the greatest glory of my work if among reasonable women this paper may furnish tea-table talk." With this variety of appeal, it is not strange that the new journal became popular. Gay wrote in May, 1 7 1 1 , two months after it began to appear : '' the Spectator ... is in every one's hand, and a constant topic of our morning conversation at tea-tables and coffee-houses."^ In August, 1 7 12, when this popularity was at its height, the govern- ment imposed on all periodicals a stamp tax of a halfpenny for each half-sheet and a shilling a week for each advertisement. As a con- sequence, a great many papers went under. For a time the Spectator continued to appear, though, as its price was doubled, many of its subscribers fell off. But the loss of the subscribers was a less serious blow to the paper than the loss of a great number of its advertisers as a result of the shilling tax. From this blow it never recovered, and was discontinued, with the 555th number, on December 6, 17 12. It was in the Tatter and the Spectator, and under the conditions imposed by the nature of these papers, that the new essay of the eighteenth century had its birth. As was only natural, many of its 1 For details concerning the circulation of the Spectator, see below, pp. 419— 420. INTRODUCTION xxix distinguishing features betrayed clearly the character of its origin. Thus, the limits of the single sheet on which the journals were printed Effect of restricted the essays to a relatively brief compass ; the periodical efforts of the writers to conceal their authorship under the publication ... ,. i • ir i • on the new names of imaginary editors gave to their seli-revelations essay ^n indirect and somewhat dramatic tone ; and the fact of periodical publication resulted in the adoption of many devices of a purely occasional and journalistic nature, such as letters from correspondents, answers to criticisms, references to events of the day, and the like. Nor was the influence of the conditions under w^hich the new essay was produced confined to these more or less external features. Written not as the seventeenth-century essay had been for a limited circle of cultured individuals, but for a large and growing periodical-reading public with diversified interests and tastes, it inevitably took on a popular tone entirely absent from the older essay. Finally, as an indirect result of its connection with the peri- odicals, the new essay came strongly under the influence of the social movement of the time. Both Steele and Addison, in numerous passages in the Tatler and the Spectator, laid great stress on the didactic character of their The influ- undertaking. Steele, in particular, made no secret of his ence of the reformatory zeal. '^ I own myself of the Society for social move- ^ . ^ ,r ,, i • ^ ,? tvt mentonthe Reformation of Manners," he wrote m latter No. 3. new essay '' Wg have lower instruments than those of the family of Bickerstaff for punishing great crimes and exposing the abandoned. Therefore, as I design to have notices from all public assemblies, I shall take upon me only indecorums, improprieties, and negligencies, in such as should give us better examples. After this declaration, if a fine lady thinks fit to giggle at church, or a great beau to come in drunk to a play, either shall be sure to hear of it in my ensuing paper; for merely as a well-bred man I cannot bear these enormities." And again, with perhaps a growing seriousness, he declared in No. 39 : ''I am called forth by the immense love I bear to my fellow creatures, and the warm inclination I feel within me, to stem, as far as I can, the prevailing torrent of vice and igno- rance." Addison was scarcely less explicit, though he perhaps emphasized more than Steele had done his intention to make his teaching agreeable. '' I shall endeavor," he wrote in a famous XXX THE ENGLISH FAMILIAR ESSAY passage in Spectator No. lo, "to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality, that my, readers may, if possible, both ways find their account in the speculation of the day. And to the end that their virtue and discretion may not be short, transient, intermitting starts of thoughts, I have resolved to refresh their memories from day to day, till I have recovered them out of that desperate state of vice and folly into which the age is fallen. ... I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I have brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses." In thus adopting as the aim of their journals moral and social reformation, Steele and Addison were simply placing themselves in line with one of the most powerful tendencies of early eighteenth- century England — the reaction against the moral license of Resto- ration society which came with the rise into prominence and affluence of the middle classes. This was not, however, the only way in which the social movement affected the periodicals, and through them the new essay. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the coffee- house had come to be one of the most influential of London institu- tions, the center of innumerable discussions on morals, literature, politics, society, in which members of the reading public sharpened \/ their wits, learned to have opinions of their own on all manner of subjects, and acquired a taste for a simple, colloquial, unbookish style of speech. The periodicals became in a very real sense the organs of this coffee-house world. Their writers were members of it ; they reported its conversation, described and sometimes satirized its characters, attempted to reform its evil tendencies, and in general reflected its spirit and tone. In short, more than any other literary form of the eighteenth century, the periodical essay was an outgrowth of the London coffee-houses. A third group of influences affecting the new essay came from the field of literature. Confronted by the problem of promoting moral and social reform and at the same time holding the interest of Literary in- ,,.,.,.,. fluences on a large and heterogeneous public, the periodical writers the period- found the somewhat narrow formula of the seventeenth- century essay inadequate to their needs. Without aban- doning it entirely (Steele, indeed, owed not a little to Cowley, and both Bacon and Montaigne continued to have an influence), they looked / INTRODUCTION xxxi about for new methods and forms that would give to their writing the variety and flexibility which both their public and their material required. Of the literary forms with which they thus attempted to vivify the essay one of the most influential was the " character." The fashion The "char- of writing " characters," or descriptive sketches of typical acter" personages, had become established in England during the early years of the seventeenth century. The event which initi- ated the vogue was the publication in 1592 by Isaac Casaubon, a celebrated French classical scholar, of a Latin translation of the C/iaraders of Theophrastus. Tyrtamus of Lesbos, commonly called Theophrastus, was a Greek of the fourth and third centuries B.C. (cir. 372-cir. 288), one of the most eminent of the disciples of Aristotle. The work by which he most affected modern literature consisted of a series of twenty-eight descriptions of the various qualities character- istic of human beings, such as garrulity, rusticity, newsmongering, impudence, superstition, tediousness, pride, timidity. In all these descriptions he followed a stereotyped method, first defining the quality in general terms, then illustrating this definition by an enu- meration of typical actions. Under the influence of Casaubon's translation the genre thus conceived became widely popular in seven- teenth-century England. The first writer to cultivate it was Bishop Joseph Hall, who published in 1608 Charactejs of Vices and Virtues, a collection of descriptions of typical personages, each embodying some moral quality, good or bad, such as the wise man, the humble man, the truly noble, the busybody, the malcontent, the vainglori- ous. Other collections followed. In 1614 appeared the "characters" ascribed to Sir Thomas Overbuiy, the subjects of which were some- what more concrete than those of Hall, and included, in addition to moral qualities, social and national types. Another character-book of the same period was John Earle's Microcosmographie, or a Piece of the World Discove7'ed in Essays and Characters, first issued in 1628 and frequently republished during the next fifty years. Earle's subjects were similar for the most part to those of the Overbury collection : he wrote of the " young raw preacher," of the " grave divine," of the " mere young gentleman of the university," of the " mere gull cit- izen," of the " plain country fellow." Numerous other collections of the same type made their appearance during the second half of the seventeenth century. xxxii THE ENGLISH FAMILIAR ESSAY Two features distinguished all of these attempts at character- writing : first, the human types they represented, whether ethical, social, or national, were but slightly individualized ; and second, as compositions they formed an independent literary species, allied to the essay but seldom combined with it. It remained for a French writer of the latter part of the century at once to individualize the " character" and to combine it organically with the essay. In 1688, at the end of a new translation of Theophrastus, Jean La Bruyere (i 645-1 696) published a series of short chapters called collectively Les Caractb'es, on les Moeui's de ce Steele} Each of these chapters treated some moral question or some phase of the social life of the time — personal merit, women, society and conversation, the city, the court, the nobility, judgments, fashion, man in general. In the first edition the essay element predominated : the chapters were very largely made up of general reflections, stated succinctly and without transitional phrases, in the form of maxims. Here and there, however, between two groups of maxims, appeared brief " characters " or portraits of representative individuals, each designated by a name of Latin or Greek origin, as, for example, Cleante, Sosie, Cresus, Narcisse. In later editions, while the reflections remained, the portraits greatly increased in number. They took various forms — descriptions, anec- dotes, dialogues, typical narratives. Whatever the form, they had one feature in common — they were all thoroughly individualized. Not merely by the use of names, but^ by the inclusion of concrete detail of all kinds, La Bruyere succeeded in giving the impression that his portraits, while representative of a class, were none the less portraits of real persons. To the writers of the Taller and the Spectator, intent on a concrete presentation of the life around them, the generalized " characters " of the type of Overbury's and Earle's made less of an appeal than the individualized character-essays of La Bruyere. Steele, in particular, found Les Caraderes a congenial work, and made no secret of his intention to imitate it.^ The " character," though perhaps the most influential, was not the only literary form from which the periodical writers took suggestions for the new essay. They learned much from the wTitings of earlier 2 An English translation appeared in 1699. 8 See Tatler No. 9. INTRODUCTION xxxiii and contemporary literary critics, notably the Englishman Dryden and the Frenchman Saint-J^vremond. They adapted to their uses Other liter- the popular genre of the epistle as it had been developed ary forms ^^ England in the middle of the seventeenth century by contributory to the new such v^riters as James Howell and Robert Loveday and essay later applied to purposes of journalism by the editors of the Athenian Mercury. They showed themselves close students of the literature of visions and allegories, ancient and modern, from Plato to Edmund Spenser. They took hints of subject and style from the collections of oriental stories that were beginning, in the early eighteenth century, to penetrate into western Europe. They borrowed not a little in the way of method from the contemporary French novelists. Such were the varied influences under which Steele and Addison created and brought to perfection the periodical essay. Steele led the The roles of way : his was the design of the Tatler and, in part at Steele and least, of the Spectator ; his were the first rough sketches the develop- ^^ nearly all the types of papers which appeared in the mentofthe two journals. But though more original than his associ- centurv" " ^^^ ^^^ possessed of greater moral fervor and power of essay touching the feelings of his readers, he was less system- atic, less scholarly, less subtly humorous ; and it remained for Addi- \ son to exhibit the full possibilities of many lines of thought and many artistic devices which he had merely suggested. However, the collaboration between the two men was ever close, and the essays which they wrote possessed numerous characteristics in common. To a reader familiar with Montaigne, Bacon, or Cowley, the essays of Addison and Steele, while presenting some traditional features, must have seemed on the whole a new species. They Distinguish- ^ , ing features were as a rule shorter than the essays of the seventeenth of the new century and, what was perhaps even more striking, all of uniform or nearly uniform length. In character they were more occasional, more satirical, more social and citified, and a great deal less bookish ; all in all, too, as compared with the work of Montaigne and Cowley, they were less intimately and directly personal. But, most of all, they exhibited a variety of subject and method quite unapproached by the essayists of the preceding century. xxxiv THE ENGLISH FAMILIAR ESSAY The themes treated in the Tatle?- and Spectator essays belonged in general to two main classes, both of which were in a measure dictated by the program of social reform for which the periodicals ^™ stood. Addison in Spectator 435 clearly indicated this divi- sion. '' Most of the papers I give the public," he said, " are written on subjects that never vary, but are forever fixed and immutable. Of this kind are all my more serious essays and discourses ; but there is another sort of speculations, which I consider as occasional papers, that take their rise from the folly, extravagance, and caprice of the present age." Among the '' fixed and imm.utable " subjects naturally appeared many of the themes of the older essayists : modesty, the government of the passions, fame, love, immortality, the vanity of ambition, conversation, friendship, honor, education, marriage, cheer- fulness, hypocrisy, the enjoyments of a country life, faith. To this group belonged also such general literary subjects as humor, wit, taste, and the pleasures of the imagination. More distinctive of the spirit and aims of the new essay were the themes of the second class — those which inspired the '' occasional papers." They included the whole range of contemporary social life, though, as was only natural, the emphasis fell on interests and customs especially characteristic of London. The absurdities of the Italian opera, the practice of the duel, the habit of taking snuff, the puppet-show, the lottery, the reading of newspapers, fashionable slang, the Midnight Masquerade, coffee- houses, " party-patches," the belief in witchcraft, the hoop-petticoat, the effect of the war on the English language, the street-cries of London, pin-money, the occupations of a young lady of fashion, the Mohocks — all these furnished material for kindly satirical essays which, though somewhat less numerous than the speculations on abstract subjects, were perhaps more popular with contemporary readers. Both groups of papers were pervaded by a common spirit — a spirit earnest and didactic, to be sure, and not particularly personal, but always urbane, and lightened when the subject demanded by touches of quiet humor. The same variety which characterized the subject matter of the new essay appeared also in its form. The essay of the seventeenth century had been a relatively simple compound of three elements — general reflections, " examples " and " sentences " from books, and personal observations or reminiscences. To these familiar elements INTRODUCTION xxxv the essayists who wrote for the Tatler and the Spectator added several others — tales of real life, elaborate classical and oriental Types of allegories, letters and diaries of correspondents, typical essays moral and social " characters," reports of the conver- sation of London coffee-houses and tea-tables. The result was that, instead of papers constructed more or less on the same pattern, they were able to give their readers a considerable number of distinct types of essays. They Avere particularly fond of what Addison called '' papers of morality," that is to say, discourses devoted primarily to the exposition Moralizing of some general ethical principle or quality, such as mod- essays esty, cheerfulness, hypocrisy, affectation. In writing them they followed no single method ; sometimes they developed their central theme in a formal, orderly way, with illustrations from the classics, the Scriptures, or the more serious modern authors ; some- times they contented themselves with simply suggesting, in para- graphs devoid of concrete detail, a few of its significant phases. Their models, so far as they were dependent upon any, were to be found in part among the writings of the earlier essayists — Bacon in partic- ular furnished them many hints of method — and in part among the sermons of the great English divines of the preceding generation. Many of the features of the " papers of morality " characterized also another type of essays much cultivated in the periodicals — Critical essays in literary criticism. These were of two classes, essays according as the starting point was a general literary idea or a particular work. Both classes were marked by like quali- ties of composition — great explicitness of plan, ample illustration, and abundant generalization. A third type of paper, somewhat less abstract than these two, in- cluded essays made up of general reflections interspersed with " char- Character acters." This type was peculiarly Steele's ; whenever, essays from early in the Tatler to the end of the Spectator^ he had occasion to treat of the broader aspects of social life — types of character, good breeding, conversation — it was in this mold that he tended to cast his thought. As in the model of the genre, Les Caraderes of La Bruyere, the function of the '' characters " was primarily illustrative. They were embedded in the reflections, sometimes one in an essay, sometimes several. Iri manner, too, they xxxvi THE ENGLISH FAMILIAR ESSAY owed much to La Bruyere. All his favorite devices of exposition — dialogue, apostrophe, description, narrative — reappeared in the work of Steele and his imitators. Even the names were largely of the same type. For a few characters who bore English names, such as Will Nice, Tom Folio, Ned Softly, there were numerous others — Clarissa, Nobilis, Senecio, Urbanus, Flavia, Eusebius — who clearly belonged with La Bruyere's Romans and Greeks. Such, in general, were the typical character-essays of the Tatler and the Spectator. In addition there were a few others, such as the account of the club at the Trumpet and the description of Mr. Spectator's friends, in which the portraits were presented for their own sake, independently of any general ideas they might serve to illustrate. But papers of this sort appeared too infrequently to constitute a separate type. Sometimes, again, the essayist, instead of pointing his moral with a '' character," employed for the same purpose an incident or scene Anecdotal from his observation of the life around him. Thus, essays Addison, who perhaps made most use of the device, introduced his remarks on popular superstitions in Spectator 7 with an account of a conversation at a friend's dinner table. In this case the anecdote preceded the reflections, which were represented as rising naturally out of it ; in other cases the order was reversed. Whatever the order, the moral of the essay commonly appeared as subsidiary to the concrete happening which started the essayist's train of thought. Still another group of essays was made up of those containing letters from correspondents, real or imaginary. This type, a favor- Letter ite with all contributors, flourished in several varieties, essays Sometimes the essayist presented his correspondent's words without comment ; sometimes he added remarks of his own, intended to supplement or enforce the point of the letter. In many cases one letter only was given ; in others the paper contained sev- eral, all perhaps dealing with different subjects. Nor were the letters themselves all of the same pattern. Some were sketches of character, others were requests for advice, still others were narratives of real life or satirical accounts of contemporary fashions and conditions. Finally, the Tatler and the Spectator contained a great many essays of a type predominantly narrative. Some, perhaps most, of these dealt with simple incidents of everyday life set in a background INTRODUCTION xxxvii of contemporary manners. Such, for example, were the accounts of Jenny Distaff's love affair and marriage, and the story of Orlando, Narrative in the Tatler \ and the narratives of Mr. Spectator's essays yisit to Sir Roger de Coverley's country place and of the old knight's return journey to London, in the Spectator. For the most part in these narrative papers the element of moralizing was slight, though it was nearly always present ; and the interest of the essays for both writers and readers lay in their faithful pictures of the habits and acts of ordinary English people. Not all of the narratives in the periodicals, however, were of this realistic sort. With the serious-minded readers of the early eighteenth century few essays enjoyed a greater vogue than those cast in the form of visions or oriental allegories. Steele experimented with this type in one or two papers early in the Tatler\ but it remained for Addison to develop it into a finished medium for the expression of moral and religious ideas. These, then, were some of the typical forms into which the writers for the Tatlei- and the Spectator cast their ethical teaching and their critical comment on the life of the day. They were not, however, always content to limit themselves to these main types. On the con- trary, they never ceased to invent new devices, which they employed perhaps no more than once or twice and then completely neglected. To this class of special essays belonged, in the Tatler., the papers on the Court of Honor, on the adventures of a shilling, and on frozen words ; in the Spectator., the journal of the Indian kings, the anatomy of the coquette's heart, the diary of Clarinda, the minutes of the Everlasting Club, and the account of Pug the Monkey. Taken all together they furnished a striking manifestation of the diversity of method and device which the new conditions of publication made characteristic of the essay. When the daily issue of the Spectator came to an end in December, 17 12, the eighteenth-century essay in all its varieties was fully formed. _ Thenceforward for over a hundred years the history of The later his- , ^ .,. . ^ , , , 1 • r 1 tory of the the familiar essay m England was the history 01 the periodical imitations made of this fixed and established type. Many, perhaps most, of these imitations appeared in single- sheet journals modeled closely on the Tatler\ by 1809 no less than 220 such periodicals had seen the light in London and other cities of the xxxviii THE ENGLISH FAMILIAR ESSAY British Isles. Of the early ventures of this type the most notable were the Guardian (17 13), edited by Steele and written by him in conjunc- tion with Addison, Pope, and others, and the revived Spectator {\^\^^ the work almost entirely of Addison. Then for a number of years the single-sheet papers took on a prevailingly political character, the reflection in large measure of the bitter party strife which raged under the first two Georges ; and familiar essays, though they con- tinued to appear, became almost swamped under the stream of purely controversial writing. Toward the middle of the century, however, journals of a more general nature again came into vogue. The Champion (1739-1741), a semi-political paper to which the chief contributor was Henry Fielding, was followed by the Rambler (1750-1752), a strictly literary production, written almost entirely by Dr. Johnson; the Cove?it- Garden Journal {\']s,2), another enter- prise of Fielding's ; the Adventurer (i 752-1 754), a journal edited by John Hawkesworth with the aid of Johnson; the World (1753- 1756); the Connoisseur {\']t^\-\']t^(i)\ \S\q Bee (1759); the MiiTor (1779-1780); the Lounger (1785-1787); the Obsen'er (1785- 1790) ; and numerous others to the end of the century. But journals of this sort were not the only repositories in which the imitators of Addison and Steele published their works. Many essays of the Tatler and Spectator type appeared in the somewhat restricted columns of the daily and weekly newspapers ; it was in a newspaper, for example, that Johnson printed his Idler papers, and Goldsmith his Letters froin a Citizen of the World. Many also appeared in the monthly magazines which in constantly increasing numbers followed in the wake of the successful Gentleman'' s Magazine (founded 1731). And a few writers resorted to the practice, universal in the seven- teenth century, of publishing essays for the first time in volumes. To this last class belonged Vicesimus Knox, whose Essays Moral and Literary (177 8- 177 9) revealed a marked admiration for the great masters of the periodical form. Of the many essayists who in the middle and later years of the eighteenth century carried on the traditions of Addison and Steele, two won in a peculiar measure the admiration of their contemporaries — Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith. Johnson's career as a familiar essayist fell entirely within the decade of the fifties. In 1750 he began to publish the Rambler^ a INTRODUCTION xxxix paper of the type of the Tatler and the Spectator-^ it ran until 1752, and though only moderately successful when first issued, took its Samuel place as one of the standard essay-collections of the cen- Johnson tury when reprinted in volumes. Between 1752 and 1754 (1709-1784) j^g contributed a number of papers to Hawkesworth's Adventurer^ and in 1758 he started in a weekly newspaper a series of essays entitled The Idler, which continued to appear during two years. In all of these ventures Johnson's aims closely resembled those of the great essayists of the beginning of the century. The name '^ periodical mentor," which he frequently applied to himself, exactly expressed the spirit and purpose of his work ; he wrote pri- marily to satirize and correct. In his methods of composition, too, he approved himself a faithful follower of Addison and Steele, writing " papers of morality," oriental apologues, sketches of domestic life, character-essays, criticisms, letters, with little if any deviation from the model which they had set. Only in two respects, indeed, did his practice differ markedly from theirs. For one thing, though he did not entirely withhold his satire from the lighter aspects of social life, — witness the letter in the Rambler from the young lady who found country life a bore, and the Dick Minim papers in the Idler, — still his preference was for subjects of a serious moral and religious import — abstraction and self-examination, patience, the folly of anticipating misfortunes. Again, the style in which he clothed his thoughts, especially in the Rambler, drew little of its inspiration from the polished but colloquial English of the Tatler and the Spectator. Though he was to write, in The lives of the Poets, perhaps the most sympathetic appreciation of the qualities of Addison's style which the eighteenth century produced, in his own work he strove for a stateli- ness and balance of rhythm and a Latinized dignity of vocabulary quite remote from the simplicity and ease of his predecessor. Goldsmith appeared before the public as an essayist almost a decade later than Johnson. He began to contribute to the Monthly Oliver Review and other periodicals in 1757, but his charac- Goldsmith teristic manner first became manifest in a number of (1728-1774) miscellaneous papers which he wrote in 1759 for a short- lived journal called The Bee. In 1760 and 1761 he contributed to the Public ledger a series of 123 letters purporting to be written by a philosophical Chinaman sojourning in England, which were later xl THE ENGLISH FAMILIAR ESSAY reprinted under the title of The Citizen of the World.'^ These letters constituted his most extensive and elaborate excursion into the field of the essay. With the exception of a collected edition of his various papers which appeared in 1765, they were also his last publication in that genre. Goldsmith developed quite another side of his inheritance from the earlier essayists than did Johnson — the side of humor and social satire. He did not, to be sure, altogether neglect serious themes. Among his essays were numerous papers of literary criticism, a few general ethical discussions, and at least one oriental allegory — the story of Asem — the moral of which was quite as weighty as that of any similar production of Addison or Johnson. But these were not his favorite or most characteristic subjects. It was when he was recording his own or his Chinese traveler's opinions on the English passion for politics and newspapers, on the quack doctors of London, on the length of ladies' trains, on gambling among women, on the races at Newmarket, on the manners of fashionable shopkeepers, on the pride and luxury of the middle class, or picturing domestic life in the manner of Steele, or creating fantasies that Addison might have envied, that his true genius as an essayist appeared most clearly. And his manner was perfectly suited to his substance — in its simple diction and constructions and its conversational tone the direct antithesis of the manner of Johnson. The type of essay established in the Tatler and the Spectator^ and cultivated in a host of imitations throughout the eighteenth century. The survival persisted in full vigor in the early years of the nineteenth. of the peri- Its survival was especially marked in such magazines of ica essay ^^ period as the Ge7itleman''s and the Eiwopeafi. In the in the early ^ -^ nineteenth former, for example, from January, 1802, to November, century 1809, there appeared regularly a series of essays in the manner of the Spectator under the general title of The Projector. After the latter date this series was apparently crowded out by the * The method employed in these essays was by no means a new one. Used by Addison in Spectator 50, it had become especially popular after the pub- lication in 1 72 1 of Montesquieu's Lettres persanes, translated into English in 1735 ^s Persian Letters. In 1757, three years before Goldsmith began his series of essays in the Public Ledger^ Horace Walpole published a Letter from Xo Ho, a Chinese Philosopher at London^ to his Friend Lien Chi at Peking. INTRODUCTION xli growing pressure of miscellaneous contributions from correspondents ; no reason, however, was given for its somewhat sudden discontin- uance, and it seems to have been popular to the last. In the Europea7i Magazine essays of the eighteenth-century type were published regularly and in considerable numbers for at least twenty years after the opening of the century. Thus the issue for August, 1800, had an '' Essay on Fashion," manifestly modeled on the moral- izing papers of the Rambler \ and the numbers for November and December contained each an " Essay after the Manner of Goldsmith." Between January and June, 1805, imitations of Johnson were partic- ularly numerous, two in the January number being described as " by the author of the 'Essays after the Manner of Goldsmith'"; while from April to November of the same year a series called The Jester carried on the lighter traditions of the Spectator, with all the para- phernalia of correspondents and characters invented for illustration. In the numbers for July to December, 181 1, the essays were about evenly divided between imitations of the Spectator and heavier imita- tions of the Rainbler. Nor was this the end. For at least another ten years essays on the model of one or another of the great eighteenth- century writers continued to appear in the European — contributors who affected lightness and cleverness following Addison or Gold- smith, those who were oppressed with the seriousness of life finding their inspiration in Dr. Johnson. III. THE NEW MAGAZINE ESSAY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Within the early years of the nineteenth century the type of familiar essay was developed which has continued to the present. By 1825 it had largely supplanted the imitations of the Tatler and Spectator, and Lamb, Hunt; Hazlitt, De Quincey, and other writers had won for it a popularity that the essay had not enjoyed for a long time. The new type differed from the old in many essential respects. In the first place, the new essay had a much wider range of sub- ject than the old. It was no longer confined largely to " the Town," to the fashions and foibles of society, to problems of conduct and manners, or to the general principles of morality. There was, indeed, no general uniformity of topic. Each essayist wrote upon whatever xlii THE ENGLISH FAMILIAR ESSAY presented itself to him as an attractive or congenial theme ; his range of subject was determined only by the breadth or narrowness of his individual interests and sympathies. Lamb wrote of his Wide range r i • i -i .• i • of subject of schoolboy liie, oi his daily occupations, his vacation the new excursions, his friends and his family, his personal sym- pathies and antipathies ; Leigh Hunt chatted about his reading, his fireside comforts, the interesting individuals or types he had observed or experiences he had encountered, or tried to discover compensation for the deaths of little children ; Hazlitt lingered over his books or recalled his first meeting with poets later famous, recounted the delights of a solitary tramp in the open country and the evening comforts of an inn, presented the pleasures of painting or of hating, or considered the basis of his deepest feelings ; De Quincey gossiped of his acquaintances or recalled gorgeous or terrible dream fancies. As many writers of the new essay, including Lamb and Hunt and Hazlitt, spent their most active years in London, they frequently, of course, wrote on some aspect of London life, but their subjects included such as had been in large measure beneath the sympathetic regard of the eighteenth-century essayists — chimney sweeps, the postman, clerks, artisans, and sailors. In manner of presentation and purpose, too, the new essay was markedly different from the old. One of the most characteristic dif- Directness ferences is that the essayist no longer, hid his individuality and Individ- behind the elaborately sustained figure of an invented the new Mr. Bickerstaff, or Mr. Spectator, or Chinese Traveler, essay but v/rote in his ov/n person. Even when through diffi- dence he employed the editorial plural or adopted a pen-name, he really expressed his own personality, and his thin disguise was easily penetrable. Many other long-used conventions were almost wholly discarded ; for example, the machinery of clubs and correspondents, the visions and apologues, and the invented characters with classical or pseudo-classical names. The classics, too, and classical history were less drawn upon for mottoes and quotations and illustrations. In general, -there was much less artificiality and much greater direct- ness, and a strong tendency to rely for illustration upon the personal experience of the writer or of his acquaintances, upon contemporary events or those of comparatively recent history, and upon modern or native literature. Nor, as a rule, was the new essay marked by the INTRODUCTION xliii satiric or didactic tone that generally pervaded the old. The eight- eenth-century essay was largely social in character, and professed as its principal aim a reformation of the delinquencies and peccadillos of society. The new essay was just as distinctly individualistic ; as a liter- ary form it was not the vehicle of any propaganda. The character of each essayist's work as a whole was determined purely by his peculiar temperament, and any single essay might reflect his mood of a moment or the deeply grounded philosophy of his lifetime. The one property common to the essayists of the early nineteenth century is their ego- tism ; they were chiefly interested in themselves, and were frank, though by no means offensively so, in the expression of this inter- est. This frankness of egotism, however, is characteristic of the period rather than of the literary type, although, of course, a strongly personal coloring is never absent from the familiar essay of the nineteenth century. Of all the differences between the essay of the eighteenth century and that of the nineteenth, the most obvious is the much greater length of the latter. As the content of a piece of writing is largely length of dependent upon the space it is to occupy, the greater the new length of the new essay is one of its essential character- istics. The eighteenth-century essay had space for only sketches and outlines or for the treatment of a very limited phase of a subject ; the new essay could present full-length portraits or the development of ample themes, and it invited digression. The Tatler and Spectator papers, from their mode of publication and the temper of the particular reading public to whom they were directed, were very brief, ranging from about twelve hundred to fifteen hundred words each, and in this respect, as in others, they were followed by their imitators. Of the founders of the new essay, Leigh Hunt most closely resembled the writers of the preceding century in brevity ; probably in part because of his temperament, and in part because, like the earlier essayists, he wrote principally for newspapers or for periodicals modeled upon the Tatler. Lamb was between the old and the new, the Essays of Elia averaging from one and a half to two times the length of the eighteenth-century periodical essay. The greater number of Hazlitt's essays were three or four times as long as those of the Spectator type ; in this, as in so many other respects, they were wholly of the new order. Even within such expanded limits De Quincey xliv THE ENGLISH FAMILIAR ESSAY was unable to confine himself, and some of his papers were inordi- nately long. Naturally, there cannot be any definitely fixed length for the essay, but so far as there is any standard, that set by Hazlitt be- came generally observed and is now usually followed. It permits the writer to treat his theme with reasonable fullness, but checks a pres- entation that would tax the capacity of the reader at a single sitting. The changed character of the essay was the effect of a number of causes. The first was the progress of Romanticism, which, by 1820, Causes of throughout the world of literature had resulted in the the change expression of new interests or of those long dormant, — character of particularly the interest the individual felt in himself, — the essay jn the abandonment of old standards and conventions, and in experimentation with new or long-disused forms. Individualism had been strongly stimulated. The essayists were moved by the same forces as the poets. Indeed, in practically all essentials there is a manifest similarity between the new poetry and the new essay. The second cause is closely related to the first : the new forces in life and literature affected men of original and responsive genius, capable of developing a new type of essay, and by the success of their own efforts influential in establishing it in popular favor. The services of Lamb and Hunt and Hazlitt are exactly comparable to those of Wordsworth and Byron and Keats. A less general and somewhat more tangible influence was the greatly heightened interest in Montaigne. His Essais, in Cotton's translation, was one of the small stock of books identified as certainly belonging to Lamb ; he was quoted or appreciatively referred to several times by Leigh Hunt; and Hazlitt was thoroughly familiar with the Essais and a consistent admirer of both their matter and their manner. But the single factor of greatest moment in the development of the new type was the establishment of the modern literary magazine. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, publication of ment of mod- essays as independent periodicals after the fashion of the em literary Tatler and the Spectator had largely given way to publica- magazines . . . • ^1 • 1 i n tion m newspapers and magazmes. Obviously, the small news sheets could not provide space for any considerable expansion of the essay, which, moreover, was merely an excrescent growth upon them. Nor did the existing magazines, such as the GentlemarCs and the European, offer much greater possibilities. They were literally INTRODUCTION xlv magazines, overcrowded depositories of miscellaneous matter — mete- orological data, tables of the values of stocks, parliamentary reports, records of births and deaths, cursory reviews, notes of the stage and the arts, letters from correspondents and answers to them, and curi- ous information on a variety of topics. Literature was usually repre- sented in a small section devoted to whatever of essays, sketches, verse, etc. the editor needed to fill out his ninety-odd pages, or had not the heart to reject. Rarely did a number of one of the old maga- zines have a single article of genuine literary merit or interest. And the critical reviews were even more hopelessly dull and wanting in originality. Both classes of periodicals were almost wholly the product of amateurs or of poorly paid drudges. Vivification of the literary periodical first manifested itself in the critical reviews with the establishment of the Edi7ilmrgh Revieiv in 1802 and the Quartei'Iy Review in 1809, the former a Whig, the latter a Tory organ. From the first the rivalry between them was intense ; and the liberal payments to contributors soon attracted to each a group of vigorous young writers, whose pronouncements upon the social, political, and literary questions of the day, whatever they lacked in depth and poise, certainly wanted nothing in assur- ance and energy. Both the Edinburgh and the Qiiatierly became immediately and dominantly popular. The first notable effort to establish a distinctly literary magazine was made by Leigh Hunt in the Reflector (1811-1812). Lack of financial support, however, and other causes not now known made the venture abortive. But only a few years later the first modern maga- zine was actually founded. The success of the new reviews prompted William Blackwood, an active and astute Edinburgh publisher, to set up a magazine which should be equally different from the dull and characterless miscellanies then in existence. He was unfortunate, however, in the first selection of his staff, and the initial number of Blackwood'' s Magazine^ which appeared in April, 181 7, gave no real promise of originality or increased attractiveness. But with the October number John Wilson ('' Christopher North "), together with Lockhart, joined Blackwood's forces ; and the former, particularly, im- parted to the magazine a character derived from his own freshness and high spirits. Almost instantly Blackwood^s leaped into a more than local popularity. xlvi THE ENGLISH FAMILIAR ESSAY The success of Blacktvood's encouraged the establishment of the first magazine of similar character in London. This was the London Magazine^ the initial number of which appeared in January, 1820. Its first editor, John Scott, was apparently given a free hand by the owners ; he, in turn, threw open the pages of the London to good writing on almost any subject and paid for it liberally. As a result of this policy the London commanded the pens of original and attractive writers and from the beginning was of interest and high standing. After the death of Scott in a duel, rapid changes in the control of the magazine ensued, the result of which was a swift descent in its for- tunes. But it had shown the way to success and had set up a new standard for magazines. The conduct of the New Monthly Magazine illustrates the force of the example set by the Lo?ido7i. The Neiv Monthly^ which was founded in 18 14, during the first seven years of its existence was distinguished in no vital respect from the older mis- cellanies. In 1820, however, the popularity of the Lo7ido?i forced a change of policy : it was placed under the editorship of Campbell, the poet, and inaugurating a new series with the first number for 182 1, it became of the new order. Within a few more years many magazines of the older type had disappeared and very much the kind of maga- zine we know to-day had become definitely established. Probably the most obvious contribution of the modern magazine to the development of the essay was the encouragement to expansion Obligations beyond the former narrow limits, an expansion impossible of the new -^^ ^^ newspapers or in the older magazines, divided essay to the , \^ , ■, , .n, modern as they were into numerous crowded departments. Ihe magazine new magazines, unburdened with the traditions that ham- pered the old, and thus excluding much of the journalistic matter appearing in their predecessors, were able to provide not merely a page or two for an essay, but six or eight, and on occasion, ten or twelve or twenty pages. They thus made possible the changed content and manner of the essay, which could result only from an enlargement of its physical limits. But increased length and all that goes with it was not the only in- debtedness of the new essay to the new magazine. Blackwood s and the London could make a place for themselves only by being different from the long-established magazines, by surpassing them in literary interest and attractiveness ; their editors and owners accordingly vied INTRODUCTION xlvii with one another in offering inducements to writers of original power, paying them with hitherto unexampled liberality and leaving them free to write as their own genius might direct. Finally, the very fact that these magazines were new, that they were unfettered by hampering precedents, was in itself a strong incentive to break away from ex- isting conventions and to test new forms and modes. Lamb, Hunt, Hazlitt, Wilson, and De Quincey are chief among the founders of the new essay ; though Hunt, the least modern of the group, owed comparatively little to the new magazines, even he departed from his eighteenth-century models for the first time in the Reflectory and Blackwood' s produced Wilson's sketches, and the London stimulated Lamb, Hazlitt, and De Quincey to discover their peculiar genius and to give it expression. Extremely significant is the fact that the great body of familiar essays produced within the last century has been written for the modern magazine, the direct successor of Blackwood s and the London. During the period within which the new essay was established Lamb, Hunt, and Hazlitt were the most notable writers — notable for their relations to the older type or for their influence upon the development of the new, as well as for the permanent interest and attractiveness of their writings. Lamb's first essay, " The Londoner," was printed in the Morning _ Post for February i, 1802. " The Londoner " promised to be the first Charles ^^ ^ series, but the promise was not carried out, and Lamb Lamb wrote no other essays until the establishment of Leigh (1775-1834) Jaunt's Reflector. To the four issues of this magazine, which appeared probably in 1811-1812, he contributed a number of short essays as well as two important critical papers. Consequent upon the death of the Reflector was a period of scant productivity, which lasted until the appearance of the London Magazine in 1820. Lamb's first contribution to this magazine, " The South Sea House," appeared in the number for August, 1820; his last, " Stage Illusion," in that for August, 1825. Between these two dates, writing over the pen-name " Elia," which he had appropriated from an Italian fellow clerk of the South Sea House, Lamb published in the London practi- cally all his most characteristic essays. After 1820 he wrote but little except for the London, and after 1826 he practically ceased writing at all, his only considerable papers being three or four for the ephemeral xlviii THE ENGLISH FAMILIAR ESSAY Englishma7i' s Magazi?ie in 1831. Collections of Lamb's essays were made three times before his death in 1834: his Works (18 18) con- tained most of his earlier pieces, and the Essays of Elia (1823) and the Last Essays of Elia (1833) included most of his contributions to the Londo?i as well as a few of both his earlier and his later papers. Lamb's earlier essays were written under the influence of the long- established models. His first venture, " The Londoner," was obviously imitative, owing much in particular to the first number of the Spectator \ and most of his brief papers in the Reflector were con- siderably indebted to the seventeenth-century " character " or to the Tatler and its successors.^ Moreover, even in the period of Lamb's most thoroughly original work, when Elia was doing much to establish the new type of familiar essay, he at times reverted to the manner of the old : the first part of '' Poor Relations " is patterned after the seventeenth-century '' character " ; the first part of " The Wedding " is wholly in the manner of Steele's sketches of domestic life ; and " A Vision of Horns," one of the Essays of Elia not re- printed by Lamb, he himself characterized as " resembling the most laboured papers in the Spectator. ^^ But by far the greater number of the Elia essays were no more imitative than they are imitable ; they were wholly original and the expression of Lamb's own personality. They were the very perfec- tion of that kind of intimate writing which wins not merely interest for itself but affection for the writer. The content of these essays was varied. A few were playful fantasies, a few were serious musings ; a small number presented Lamb's satirical observation and comment upon incongruities of conduct, a larger number, his humor- ous observation of incident and character ; and seven or eight were critical papers on books and the stage. In almost every one of these papers, even those professedly critical, Lamb's personality was warmly reflected, and by far the greater number of his essays were undisguised autobiography and reminiscence, written in the first person. They recorded ingenuously his sympathies and his prejudices, 1 Something of the nature of the relationship between Lamb's early papers and the eighteenth-century periodical essay will appear from an examination of " A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People," which appeared first in the Refecior 2ind was later reprinted with some changes as an Elia essay. INTRODUCTION xlix presented him and his family and his friends, disclosed his habits, and unveiled his memories. They formed almost a complete record of his life, together with an intimate and candid commentary upon it. In them appeared his tenderness and manliness, his tolerance of every- thing but pretence and priggishness and complacent stupidity, his intensely social nature, his liking for people with some harmless idiosyncrasy, his keen observation of the unexpected hidden amid the commonplace, his devotion to his old folios, and his half-humorous, half-pathetic attitude toward life. Lamb's most fundamental characteristic was his humor — tender, playful, fantastic, never bitter, usually warming the reader's feeling or flashing a glimpse of a truth hitherto unconsidered. Very fre- quently the vehicle of this humor was a comparison startlingly unexpected, but perfectly appropriate and owing much of its happi- ness of effect to a suggestion of incongruity. The illustrative or figurative half of such a comparison was usually drawn from Lamb's familiar acquaintance with English literature of the late sixteenth and the seventeenth century — Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dram- atists, Milton and Marvell, Burton and Browne and Fuller, and the Bible. From the same sources came the abundance of allusion that enriched every page, and the choice of word and turn of phrase that gave to his diction its archaic flavor. The result was not the affecta- tion and artificiality that might have been expected, but what Lamb called a '' self-pleasing quaintness," a style and manner peculiarly his own and perfectly expressive of his individuality. About two years after the appearance of Lamb's '' The Londoner," Leigh Hunt began to contribute his juvenile essays to the Traveller Tames Henry newspaper (1804-1805), and during the next fifty years, Leigh Hunt amid much ephemeral matter, largely critical or joumal- (17 4-1059) \