INTRODUCTION.

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LOOSE sally of the mind; an irregular, indigested piece; not a regular and orderly composition "-such is Johnson's definition of an essay. The first of these phrases admirably describes the typical eighteenth-century essay, but the term has so wide an application, embracing the maxims of Bacon, the philosophy of Locke, and the loose sallies of Steele and Addison, that the necessity is at once obvious of drawing some broad lines of demarcation among its various significances. The difficulty of making any such division is probably greater in the case of the essay than with any other generic name employed in literature, but three leading senses may be noted in which the term is used. It may be modestly applied to an elaborately finished treatise; or, with more direct reference to its primary meaning, it may denote the brief, general treatment of any topic, an author's preliminary skirmish with his subject; while again, it may mean a short discursive article on any literary, philosophical, or social subject, viewed from a personal or a historical standpoint. It is with essays of the last kind that this volume deals, and its scope is still farther limited by the exclusion of professedly critical papers. Literary criticism is a subject of so much importance and interest that

it must be regarded as an independent development, and the separation can be justified also on another ground. It is no violence to literary usage to think of the English Essayists as those who took for their special subject-matter the varying phases of contemporary manners and customs; and in tracing the course of this particular kind of writing, one meets with everything that is most characteristic in the periodical essay. The titles employed by the earlier essayists indicate pretty clearly the range of the subjects attempted. They hint, also, that the essayist must possess experience of and insight into character, a critical taste free from pedantry, and an easy literary style. The typical essayist must to some extent be at once a rambler, a spectator, a tatler, and a connoisseur.

It is a suggestive fact that after the artificial comedy of manners the next great development in literature was the essay of contemporary manners. It began at a time when the stage was in a state of decline. Artificial comedy, the characteristic product of the Restoration age, was still reeling under the onset of Jeremy Collier. Dryden had made a dignified apology, Congreve had prevaricated in vain, Farquhar, and more especially Steele, had in some degree purified the stage, but the theatre had no longer a paramount literary importance until Garrick appeared to act and Goldsmith to write. When the disorderly pulses of Restoration activity had finally resumed a normal beat, a vast change had taken place in the nature of social life, and there was need of some new form of literature to gratify the cravings of Queen Anne society.

It was the work of the essay to supply this demand, to judiciously season culture with the requisite spice of scandal, and to exhibit the foibles of the time with a humour that should not be impure.

In tracing the course of any literary development, one is apt to exaggerate the importance of the casual coincidences to be found in the literature of different periods. Passages might be singled out from Elizabethan prose bearing a certain resemblance to the essay proper; but, as Professor Saintsbury has pointed out, importance is to be attached not to "the occasional flash here and flash there of 'modernism', but the general presence of a tendency distinctly different from that of the main body of forerunners". Bacon's essays form a collection of wonderfully shrewd and pithy observations, and have been a veritable mine of suggestions for writers since; but in no real sense can they be said to be prototypes of the eighteenth-century essay. They are, in his own words, but "certain brief notes set down rather significantly than curiously; not vulgar, but of a kind whereof men shall find much in experience and little in books". tween them and the Tatler there is nothing more than a nominal connection, and even to Dryden, Cowley, and Temple the Spectator owes but little obligation. To Dryden belongs the credit of having given modernism to English prose and of having founded literary criticism. His Prefaces are certainly essays, not dissimilar in kind to the critical papers in the Spectator; but then it is not in these latter that the peculiar significance of Addison's work is to be found. It is often difficult to draw a

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line between literary criticism and gossip about literature, but any essay in which the predominance of the former element is tolerably clear must be relegated to a different current of development from that of the periodical essay. Still, Dryden must be included among the remote pioneers of the latter, from the one fact that he made frequent use of a simple, colloquial style, intended to appeal not to a small circle of critics but to a wider and more popular audience. On the other hand it is sometimes claimed that the essay was the product of French and Italian influence, and Dr. Johnson, in his account of its origin, has singled out for mention the works of Casa, Castiglione, and La Bruyère. It is only misleading, however, to connect the essay with such a book as Casa's Galateo, a somewhat rambling and casuistical treatise on polite behaviour which, nearly two centuries later, found a counterpart in Chesterfield's Letters to his Son. Nor is it less far-fetched to attach much importance to The Courtier of Castiglione. That this work enjoyed a great popularity is evident from the number of its editions and translations, but it would be absurd to say that its diffuse moralizings on the character of the ideal courtier of Urbino had any sensible influence on the English essay. The Characters of La Bruyère, avowedly modelled on those of Theophrastus, are in many respects so admirable as to justify their mention by Johnson. They were known to both Steele and Addison, to whom they very probably suggested many subjects for treatment; but they are too fragmentary, too much after the style of the seventeenth-century

"character", to be seriously included among the antecedents of the Tatler, and their importance still further diminishes when it is remembered that Montaigne, Bacon, Dryden, and Cowley had all written prior to them. The truth is that the only obligation the English essay owes to foreign suggestion is to the essays of Montaigne. To what extent he borrowed from Seneca and Plutarch is not worth considering, for it would be as hypercritical to engineer a parentage for Montaigne's happy egotism as to ferret out the antecedents of Pepys' Diary. His essays at the time were unique, and Montaigne is the first philosopher in an easy chair. It can scarcely be determined at what point his influence first made itself felt in the progress of the English essay. Bacon owed him nothing, but it is interesting to find as a connecting-link between Montaigne and Dryden that the latter, after declaring that a preface should be "rambling", admits that he learned this "from the practice of honest Montaigne". Cowley's essay, Of Myself, implicitly makes the same admission. Once for all the Frenchman had vindicated the essayist's right to be pleasantly discursive, and the spirit of his influence breathes in the lucubrations of Bickerstaff not more than in the essays of Hazlitt, Hunt, and Lamb. Montaigne is, indeed, the prince of tatlers. There is no questioning his right to be called the inventor of the essay form in its most general sense, but it remained for his English successors to limit its scope by prescribing a certain unity of design, and some restraint in the essayist's use of irrelevancy and egotism.