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 umberless 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 o 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 naturally is with

those who are destined to succeed in that way of writing. With the scholar, in one of the old comedies, the youthful aspirant may honestly confess, "I did essay to write essays." That a vast proportion of failures might be recorded, weighs no more against our views than the as frequent failures in lyric efforts. The essayist is thus an humbler sort of bard, a prose lyrist, a writer of the walk of poetry, which Horace includes under the designation "musa pedestris." Under this class fall most of the essayists. Swift, in verse and in prose, is much the same; so we may say of Pope, and of the earlier English satirists.

Essays, too, are very similar to letters, in their variety of topies; in their familiarity of address, and in the "handling" or style. Most letter-writers address individuals only; the regular essayist addresses the public as well. There is only a wider circle of readers, and something by way of difference, in the feelings of professed authorship. Equal vanity, or egotism, or wise self-consideration, as you will, is to be allowed to either writer, equal room for portraits of character and sketches of manners, for humorous satire or generous compliment, for speculative or ethical discussion, for æsthetical analysis, or historical retrospect. Both are in the nature of confessions as well as homilies, though the latter are apt to predominate. The history of a man's mind, his only true autobiography, change of tastes and pursuits, favorite opinions held at different periods, why changed, and how often, these are to be studied in volumes of essays, with more confidence than in most volumes of biography. There are two remarks of Zimmerman that deserve to be noticed on this subject. Defending the practice of a man's writing memoirs of himself, he says, he thinks it wiser and more laudable, than for him to leave his body by will to a pro

fessor of anatomy; and, in another place, he tells an obvious truth, (not noticed perhaps for that reason,) that the great advantage of writing, is to give a man an opportunity to express that upon paper, which he could not with freedom or courtesy, in the ordinary intercourse with society. Now, essays give that freedom in its widest allowable limits, restrict the writer less in the development of his humors, whims, and agreeable prejudices upon paper than any other species of composition. It is indeed a mixed kind of writing, personal authorship, as free as possible from mere scholasticism or pedantry.

Neither is it any nearer extinction now than in the days of Montagne, who is commonly known as the father of the Essay. Its features may be somewhat changed, but there is the same outline, the same expresson. It may at one epoch handle different topics from those which engross it at another, Fashion, manners, character, books and politics. The commonest leaders in the penny papers are strictly essays, no less than most of the Review articles. The best portion of the contemporary lectures and addresses is strictly of an essay character, and the passages in the greatest orations are of the same description, and can be taken from the text in which they appear as independent

essays.

Trifling writers of insipid imitations of Byron and Moore speak contemptuously of essays, as dull or vapid. No more such, we venture to say than the same attempts of writers in verse of equal power. Dull essayists enough are to be found, but at least as many bad poets, and certainly a larger number of indifferent books of sermons. Indeed, a good essay is likely to be better than even a good sermon; we entirely exclude those of the great old divines, who rank with the poets

and dramatists of their age. A sermon admits of many formal divisions, easily filled up in a mechanical manner; it allows a good deal of commonplace, in the way of logical discussion and incentives to devotion. Its exhortations and apostrophes are stereotyped. And only the fancy of Taylor, the wit of the South, the fullness of Barrow, the ingenuity of Clarke, can overcome the mass of arguments, illustrations and appeals, that encumber the-path of the preacher. Even able men are often dull in the pulpit; while, at the bar, or in a contest of wit, they might become bright by the encounter. Sermons must be copiously written and illustrated, to suit the majority of congregations; essays must be close and compact; containing a page in a paragraph, an argument in an epigram, full of quick transitions, stating results and processes, which must be alluded to, and in a word giving in a few pages what a common writer might spread over a volume.

On this side of the water, notwithstanding its prevalence in the Review, the Magazine and the Newspaper, we find a clever critic in a Charleston paper, simultaneously uttering the heresy of the London Spectator. As for this last writer's general remarks upon the essay, the facts of literary history are against him, from Bacon to Leigh Hunt. English literature has always been rich in essayists, though in the reign of William III. and Anne they were most prominent. It is needless to make a long list, but we can promise this much: For every sterling writer of prose fiction in England, we will bring the name and works of a classic, among the essayists. This assertion may appear a little loose or careless, but we can support it with confidence.

Writers of this class have been quite too long huffed and bullied by the long-winded historical novelists and reviewers,

who think the essay contemptible from its brevity, certainly not from its subjects, nor yet from its execution.

Our literature is pre-eminently a periodical one thus far, and slurs on the essay certainly do come with bad grace from those who know the reading community with us live almost altogether on journals of different classes. Our finest writers thus far have been essayists, Dana, Channing, Everett, &c., to say nothing of minor names.

It was once a common folly to depreciate a host of writers of short pieces, as minor poets, because the authors (thank heaven!) of no long poems; yet they have often flown higher, if they do not remain so long on the wing. A falcon is a nobler bird than the buzzard, who may be hovering over carrion all day, while the former towers in his pride of place, when there is fit occasion, and does not waste his energies on every petty one.

"The Phoenix Pindar is a vast species alone," yet that same Pindar came from a certain district of Greece where the owls predominated, who doubtless thought they could see far better and judge more wisely than he. They are not a species alone; we have critical birds of the same strain here also.

The political essay was that form first cultivated by the writers of consecutive papers, arranged in order, and under a leading caption. Thus the first series of essays in English (not the miscellanies of Temple and Cowley) formed a melange of politics, social satire, town sketches, personality, and criticism—of these Defoe's Journal-the Review, which preceded the Tatler and Spectator, is perhaps the first specimen of the kind we can point to. L'Estrange, who was the very first of the political pamphleteers, restricting his lucubrations chiefly to politics; but Defoe, in his Review, had his club, like that in the Spectator, who discussed similar questions,