INTRODUCTION.

The present collection embraces articles in various Journals, (Arcturus, the Church Record, the Boston Miscellany, Democratic and Whig Reviews, Union Maga-' zine and the Literary World; from which sources, the volume entitled Literary Studies was also selected,) published during the last nine years. This fact is mentioned to account for a diversity of style, that may be remarked among the essays, a comparative harshness in some and an acquired facility in others. The papers are not arranged chronologically, but rather according to the subjects, a natural division under which they fall. None of the papers in this volume are included in either Literary Studies' or 'the Analyst.'

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The contents of this series have been selected with no little care long review articles, and certain papers of literary statistics, at once didactic and declamatory, in some cases hastily made up and in which a good deal of catalogueing too frequently occurs, have been omitted. A

volume of equal size might be filled with these, but it was preferred to present a single volume of a choicer character than a brace of volumes of a more miscellaneous description.

In some instances, the essay matter of a gossiping retrospective review has been retained and the illustrative literary portraits excluded, and again in other cases, literary portraits have been extracted without any reference to the text in which they occur.

NOVEMBER 19th, 1849.

W. A. J.

1.

ESSAY WRITING. THE CHAMPION.

"TEN censure wrong for one who writes amiss," sang Pope, and a juster line he never wrote himself. We have daily evidence of its truth, especially in this era of multifarious and indiscriminate criticism. Every man is a reader, and a critic, of course; the corollary follows the proposition as closely as demonstration upon mathematical reasoning. To be a tolerable author requires some brains and tact in writing; but to become a regular critic, nothing is needed but the not uncommon union of arrogance, ignorance, insolence, and stupidity. To praise judiciously the rarest works (the verdict of love and knowledge combined) appears tame and insipid, to those who love the slashing style, who consider abuse, satire; and presumption, boldness; who vote ribaldry, wit; and give the palm of copious, manly eloquence, to coarse, declamatory invective.

In a late notice of Chambers' Essays in the London Spectator, we find the writer, who gives the author his fair share of praise, speaking of the decline of the Essay, and of its gradual extinction, as if the shortest, the most direct, the most personal, the most natural, form of prose-writing could ever become extinct, any more than letters, or songs,

or oratory. With all of these the essay has much in common, and especially in its personal character, implying a familiarity, a mutual confidence and an explicit directness, not to be attained in a higher or more ambitious form of composition. Since composition has become the business of men of the world and men of business-since it has found its way into other hands than those of the monks and scholastics of the Middle Ages, it has become more and more conversational, pithy, plain, and unpretending. Respectability in authorship is now nothing to be proud of, in intellectual circles and in the midst of a high civilization. No longer do we gaze with awe and admiring wonder at poet or philosopher. They have become commonplace people in the popular eye. They are as wise, as good, as imaginative as ever, but they do not seem to be so.

Essay-writing in prose is very much the same thing as song-writing in verse. A certain lyrical spirit is to be found in the best essayists, however homely and anti-poetical the essays may be; as in Franklin's, or the second-rate papers of Hazlitt (who is hardly a fair instance, for he was a poet as much as Burke or Jeremy Taylor.) Some of Lamb's are conceived in the highest poetic strain, as Bulwer has remarked of the Horatian Apostrophe to the Shade of Elliston, and numberless passages in the Essays of Elia. Hunt displays as much fancy in prose description, often as in his poetry. Emerson's essays often conceal more poetic feeling than he developes in his poetry.

This kind of writing is as natural to a young prose writer to attempt as it is in a genuine poet to commence his career by songs, as natural as for the " feathered songster of the field" to pour forth his "unpremeditated lay.' It is certainly a matter of impulse with most, and most