INTRODUCTION THE term essay is used loosely of many different kinds of rature, but almost always means a relatively short prose mposition of an expository character. It may exist for ne useful purpose, and resemble a brief treatise; or, at the posite extreme, it may be wholly concerned with pleasurable k about personal or even trivial things. Upon its subject_tter, then, there are practically no limits at all. For the rposes of knowledge, we are likely to value most highly the ay which is most impersonal or objective,--that is, which phasizes the subject under consideration and not the one conering it; for the purposes of pure literature, that essay is ually best which shows most of the writer's personality. Essays may be conveniently classified in three groups: (1) e gnomic or aphoristic, (2) the personal or familiar, and ) the didactic or critical. Those of the first type are chiefly ade up of wise sayings or aphorisms. To see how an essay this character naturally comes into existence, one has only look at the Book of Proverbs in the Bible. The greater >rtion of that book is made up of detached aphorisms, or all groups of them dealing with a single subject; but at nes something like a connected essay is developed, as in the count of the Virtuous Woman in the last chapter. Essays the second type are accounts of a subject from the disnctive standpoint of the writer,-representing, it may be, his ere likes and dislikes, or some passing mood to which he ishes to give expression. As has already been suggested, this the kind likely to be valued most highly from the literary oint of view. Essays of the third type undertake to discuss subject with critical judgment, representing not merely the |