in the skill with which he brings together in the essay form the results of his reading and his personal experiences. His personality, however, is less agreeable; he was a somewhat fretful and wayward person, who, falling short of the sweet and sound character of Lamb, falls short correspondingly in his work. Moreover, he did not have the art of doing finely finished work in brief space, but let his pen run on with little sense of definite plan or end. Hence one of his essays is like a piece of tapestry of no definite pattern, which can therefore be cut into lengths of varying dimensions without injury; whereas one of Lamb's is more likely to resemble a tapestry complete in itself. Yet despite these things, Hazlitt is an essayist of great importance, and the substance of his writings is so full and varied that one may take them up day after day for many days, always certain of coming upon ideas fresh and worth while. The third of these magazine essayists of the period, Leigh Hunt, is like Lamb in his amiability, and like Hazlitt in the rambling and uncertain quality of his art. His essays are almost always agreeable, but rarely the very best of their kind.

The other type of periodical, the critical, is represented chiefly by the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review, founded respectively in 1802 and 1809. These journals devoted themselves chiefly to book notices, but they made of them much more than brief descriptions; those who wrote the reviews were encouraged to develop them into extended discussions of whatever subject was suggested by the book in hand. The result was a new type of essay. Of the review editors the greatest was Francis Jeffrey, who was connected with the Edinburgh from its beginning until 1829; his own critical essays are among the most readable of the period. In 1825, however, he found a young contributor whose fame soon surpassed his own. This was Thomas Babington Macau- ✓ lay, who began his career with a review of a recently discovered work of Milton's, from which he branched out,

according to the accepted fashion, into a full essay on Milton and his times. When Jeffrey had read the manuscript, he is reported to have said, "The more I think, the less I can conceive where you picked up that style!" Henceforth Macaulay became the Edinburgh's leading reviewer, and he remains the most widely read English essayist of the critical type. Almost all his essays, one will see by looking into a collective edition, were book reviews in their origin, but were developed into brilliant discussions of the principal subject. overflowing with the riches of Macaulay's mind; for he was an enormous reader, and had the most retentive memory of any modern writer. He was particularly interested in the history and the biography of the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries-the period treated in his History of England; and it is in his essays which concern this same period that his most valuable work is found. Macaulay was a brilliant public speaker too, and combines something of the dogmatic clearness and force of an orator with the more usual style of the essayist.

Thomas De Quincey was equally a magazinist and a reviewer; he wrote with brilliancy of both his own experiences and literature, and so fluently and abundantly that he came to be called "the great contributor." His most famous persona! essay, the "Confessions of an Opium-Eater," was rather too long to conform to the usual standards of the essay, and he later expanded it into an entire book. What has been said of Hazlitt, indeed, applies to De Quincey even more: he rarely thought of the essay form as setting definite bounds to his composition, but wrote on and on in colloquial fashion, never systematic, always fluent and clever. In consequence, one usually reads him in fragments, as one drops into a room to listen to a brilliant conversationalist, knowing that it matters comparatively little when one comes in or goes out.

Both Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, the leading prose writers of the mid-nineteenth century, are also better known

as miscellaneous writers than as essayists in the stricter sense. Carlyle wrote a number of essays of the book-review type, of which those on the poet Burns and on Boswell's Life of Johnson are the chief; but his most characteristic work was done in books, like Sartor Resartus or Past and Present, which must be read pretty thoroughly to be well understood, though many of their chapters may be viewed separately as essays on moral and social themes. Ruskin never contributed to the magazines, nor set out to write essays at all. He wrote lectures, treatises, and letters, always designed to enforce some truth respecting art, ethics, or society, or to awaken his readers to more vivid views of both the physical and spiritual world. There is not, then, a single distinctive essay among his many works; but numerous passages stand out in the reader's memory with almost all the qualities of the essay, such as the famous account of the two cathedrals, English and Venetian, included in this collection, a passage which in its original setting is merely incidental to Ruskin's exposition of the qualities of various types of architecture. If we may call

him an essayist, then of all our essayists he shows the most remarkable combination of the methods of poetry and of prose; for he is like the poets in loving beautiful words and images for their own sake, and in expressing his personal feelings with great intensity, while at the same time, like the prose writers, he has in view some practical and didactic end.

The chief Victorian novelists also wrote essays by the way. Those of George Eliot are of the serious critical type, written for the great reviews. Those of Dickens and Thackeray are chiefly of the informal familiar type, often close to the border of fiction; Dickens's were written for his periodicals, Household Words and All the Year Round, and Thackeray's for the Cornhill Magazine during the period of his editorship.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century two English writers attained distinction in different forms of the essay,Matthew Arnold in the critical type, and Robert Louis Steven

son in the familiar. Arnold, like Ruskin, was always disposed to teach, and in both literary and social criticism he exerted a strong influence on thoughtful men of his time. His Essays in Criticism (published in two collections, 1865 and 1888) are perhaps the finest specimens of the review essay in the modern period, while in the several chapters of the book called Culture and Anarchy he applies the essay method to the whole question of the art of living. Stevenson, on the other hand, viewed the essay like the romance, as a means of recreation, and revived the familiar form of it more successfully than anyone had done since the days of Lamb. His success, of course, was due to the same cause as Lamb's-the unmistakable charm of his personality, which made the mere writing down of himself a thing worth while. He began his work as an essayist while still an undergraduate at Edinburgh, and first attained distinction in the Travels with a Donkey, diary-like sketches of a tour in the south of France. Later essays appeared in various periodicals, and were collected in the volumes called Virginibus Puerisque, Familiar Studies of Men and Books, and Memories and Portraits (1881 to 1887).

In America the writing of essays began when the Spectator type was still the chief model in men's minds, and Washington Irving followed this type in the essays of his Sketch-Book (published 1820) so agreeably that he found many readers in Great Britain as well as in his own land. Emerson, however, was the earliest American essayist to attain a place of the first importance, and he remains our most distinguished name in the field of the essay. The most striking characteristic of his essays is their return to the method of the aphoristic form; in this sense they are more like Bacon's than those of any other modern writer. The reason for this is not that Emerson set out to write in the manner of Bacon, or of anyone else, but that his method of thought made him emphasize the separate sentence rather than the whole composition. He saw truths one at a time, and, instead of undertaking to argue

about them, or to build up a careful expository structure to make them clear, he simply stated them, like an oracle or a prophet, hoping that the truth in men's minds would recognize them instinctively. He knew as well as any one that the result was a style which could not be thought a model of coherence. "Here I sit and read and write," he once said, "with very little system, and as far as regards composition with the most fragmentary result; paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle." In reading one of Emerson's essays, then, one must not expect to go from one definite point to another along a line of thought, but rather to move around and around the principal theme, viewing it from many rewarding points of view.

Of the other New England writers of the same period, Henry David Thoreau was most like Emerson, and indeed viewed himself in some sense as a disciple of "the sage of Concord." Yet he lived very much his own life, and wrote like no one else. Thoreau wrote no separate essays of great distinction; but the chapters of his chief book, Walden, and of his other books dealing with the life of the spirit as he lived it out-of-doors, have some of the fine qualities of both the serious and the familiar essay. Contemporary with these two men of Concord were two at Cambridge, Lowell and Holmes. James Russell Lowell may be regarded as the chief of American critical essayists; he wrote on many subjects, but most intimately and effectively on literature, in the volumes called Among my Books (1870-76). Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote no essays in the stricter sense, but in his Autocrat papers he developed the method of the essay in the free manner of conversation, and sometimes introduced passages which have the character of independent compositions, like that included in the present collection. These papers were first contributed to the Atlantic Monthly and then published in the volume called The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, a title which represents a personality-partly fictitious, partly