ESSAYS FROM THE EASY CHAIR. In 1854 George William Curtis began to write familiar and personal essays in a department of Harper's Magazine called "The Easy Chair.p He continued to do so for the 38 remaining years of his life, writing approximately 2,500 in all. In these essays he dealt with every sort of imaginable subject —"with worthies ancient and modern, with early impressions and striking contemporary situations, with poets and novel ists and orators and actors and musicians, with every aspect of the social comedy as viewed by the most genial of spectators, with all matters that seemed to lend themselves to his purpose of unobtrusive didacticism — a purpose so veiled by animated and fanciful discourse that the reader is hardly conscious of its existence." From these essays three volumes of representa tive essays were selected and republished after his death. They not only throw interesting side-lights upon his ov,m life and personality, but together they constitute a series of invalu able incidents and interpretations of American life for nearly half a century.
Curtis has many of the characteristics of the men who from Montaigne to Stevenson have made of the personal type of essay one of the permanent and most delightful forms of litera ture. The light touch, personal likes and dis likes, character sketches, delicate humor and pathos, suggestive bits of wisdom, are all found in his essays. He suffers most by contrast with Lamb in his lack of felicitous literary allusion and in his failure to secure the more perma nent effects of rhetoric, in the better sense of that word. He is perhaps more like Addison, or Goldsmith, or Irving, though less final in his power of expression than any of them.
A typical volume of these essays gives some idea of the range of his topics. He has reminis cences of Edward Everett, Emerson, Dickens, Thoreau, Wendell Phillips, Jenny Lind, Thackeray and Browning, each of whom is recalled in some typical lecture or conversation or dinner. The theatre figures in an account of Jefferson as Rip Van Winkle and in reminis cences of Fanny Kemble and John Gilbert That he was fond of music is suggested in "The Opera in 1864," °Thalberg 'arid Other Pianists) and °Cecilia Playing.* Typical sketches of social life and of various aspects of New York are to be found in °Shops and Shopping," °Mrs. Grundy and the Cosmopoli tan,'" °Easter Bonnets" and °The Town.* At the time Curtis was writing such essays for Harper's Magazine he was writing edi torials for Harper's Weekly and delivering ad dresses throughout the country of an entirely different character. It issurprising that the man who was a leader in the movement for civil service reform, who helped to inaugurate the independent movement in American politics, and who at an earlier date took a prominent part in the organization of the Republican party, should have been able to detach himself from the stream of affairs as he did in his charming essays. In this respect, as in many others, he was like his friend James Russell Lowell, who wrote to him words that best give an interpretation of his personality: "Had letters kept you. every wreath were yours; Had the acrid tempted. all ita chariest doors Had on flattered hinges to admit Such high manners. such good natured wit."