ESSAY (OF. «sai. (Tsui, Fr. essai, Sp. ensayo, lt, saggio, experiment, •from Lat. exagium. a weighing, from ex/gyre, to examine. exact. drive out. from ex. out 4- ,sere, to thrive). The history of the e..ay as a separate form of literature be gan near the end of the sixteenth century. It is true that the °cies .1 lira' of Aldus Genius, with their speculation and criticism, the tales of Pin tare'', Hell in heroie oneedote• and even some of the orations of ('kern. such as the Pro .Irek in, are suggestive of discursive. historical, and lite rary ...says of Renaissanee and modern writers: yet to none of the aneients belong, the honor that is Alontaigne's—tIn credit of being the father of the essay, the initiator of a literary form. In distinction from tragedy, the epic, and other earlier forms, spontaneity' and freedom from arti ficial limitations marked the essay, and have continued to mark it. In lontaigne's first two books of 1580 the diversity of subject is equaled alone by the wideness of range allowed on each page. Montaigne said that his aim was to portray himself, yet in doing this he well knew how at the same time to limn the features of his age and to mirror the aspect of all humanity. lie combined the evidence of his own tastes not alone with the illustration of the customs of his contemporaries, but also with wise comment on subjects of continual interest. His was the conversational method. "I speak unto paper as unto the first man I meet," he somewhere tells us, and this is the keynote to the writings of all who are truly Montaigne's de scendants. Steele, Addison, Lamb, trying, and Stevenson, all show that easy flow of language, the grace, the wisdom, and the wit, and that wide culture leading easily to a pleasant abundance of literary quotations that are the most apparent qualities in the kind of essay which Montaigne originated. The personal note is never quite absent, often rising, as in the Essays of Elia, to an egotism full of charm. The essay of this kind may be thought of as the overflow of a cul tured nature in hours of leisure; and herein lies the secret of its absence in our life,of hurry and tension.
The other preeminent name in the history of the essay is that of Bacon. Characteristically Eng lish, as Montaigne was characteristically French, Bacon put, if not more suggestion and charm, more solidarity into his essays. Whether he writes of religion, of friendship, or of studies, he adheres more closely to his theme, and focuses the light of his learning more directly. In this regal(' flacon rather than Montaigne is the literary progenitor of the essayist as we know him to-day—the writer who invades every field of action, of feeling, and of thought as first and foremost an expositor. Whether it he the histori cal essay of Fronde. the political essay of Montes quieu, the critical essay of Macaulay, Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold. the scientific essay of I tuxley, the relation of all that is written to a single defi nite subject or character is the distinguishing trait ; and with this expository and primarily in structive nature, the tendency has been away from a subjective. personal. and leisurely, to an objec
tive, unemotional, and concentrated method. Bacon himself, through the magnitude of his genius and his knowledge, was able to combine the utmost usefulness in content, characteristic of the modern essay, with the charm of style which is the more natural concomitant of the earlier fashion. After him Cowley, Temple. and Shaftesbury passed on the pleasant light to Steele and Addison, whose Taller and Spectator were the first. of a series of journals that dis tinctly left their impress on English society. The tinily morsels of literary comment and wisdom that were served with the morning chocolate modified the manners of the very people whose foibles were so pleasantly satirized; and al though it is true that the Spectator and its suc cessors. by reason of their sanity and grace, ap pealed immediately only to a definite group. fraction of the social unit, these journals must be looked upon as a conservative force in morality as well as in literature. This praise applies to the essay in almost all its manifestations; for reflection, the site qua non of essay-writing, is essentially conservative. As the mune indicates, the essay is a weighing—an assay that tests and reveals the precious metal in human thought and action. The greater the charm with which this is done, the more useful becomes the exposition, and a (*tat is, a Lowell, a Lamb will succeed, where a prosy writer will merely bore. John son, for all his wisdom, was too ponderous to make his Rambler as enjoyable as the Specta tor, and so it holds a less cherished place in the annals of English letters. The 'written talk' es say tradition was continued by the Guardian, and other journals, until it rose into fresh pre eminence with the Essays of Elia, a volume writ ten by Lamb for his London friends of his own day—for unknown friends in many lands and of ninny ages. Since then there have been few to succeed in this genial field, and Irving's Sketch Book, the papers of Curtis, Stevenson's Firgini bus Puerisque stand out in sweet and pathetic solitude. Austin Dobson is perhaps the sole worthy devotee at a shrine neglected by the hur rying crowds of to-day. Besides the authors already mentioned. Burton, the author of the Anatomy of Melancholy, Ilrowne, who wrote Retigio Medici, Defoe, Goldsmith, De Quincey, Hazlitt. Wilson ('Christopher North'), Bunt, Swift, Shelley, Southey, and Jeffrey, may be mentioned as the important essayists who preceded 'Macaulay. Milton, I fume, Berkeley, and Coleridge are of course significant names, but their essays are illustrative of little that could not be suggested by contemporary writings.