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This infidelity to popular government and unbelief in any good results to come from it are not, unfortunately, confined to the English essayists. I am not sure but the notion is growing in what is called the intellectual class, that it is a mistake to intrust the government to the ignorant many, and that it can only be lodged safely in the hands of the wise few.
Its scope is far more restricted, yet its plane is infinitely higher, its reach incomparably further. The Print which it proposes to lead the Way into is that print where the elect, who were once few and are now many, are making the corridors of time resound to their footsteps, as poets, essayists, humorists, or other literary forms of immortality.
She received him in the parlour, but their evenings commonly ended in her little studio, whither some errand took them, or some intrusion of the other boarders banished them. There he read to her poems or long chapters out of the essayists or romancers; or else they sat and talked about the strange things they had noticed in themselves that were like the things they found in their books.
The little supper, which was very plain; the literary chat; the discussions of English poets and essayists, several of which were reprinted at this era; and the encouragement of native writers, of whom there were but few except in the line of sermons and orations.
We have wits and humorists and amusing essayists, authors of some of the airiest and most graceful contributions of the present century, and we owe them to the new impulse given to our literature in 1819.
The student of Law, again, was a learned man. "He had turned over the leaves of Justinian's 'Institutes, and knew that they were written in Latin. He attended the Parliament House in the character of a critic, and could give you stale sneers at all the celebrated speakers. He was the terror of essayists at the Speculative or the Forensic. In social qualities he seems to have stood unrivalled.
Very good collections have been made from them, especially in a series of books known as "Modern British Essayists." Read, for example, Sydney Smith's essay on "Female Education"; one of Jeffrey's criticisms on the early poets of this century; an historical or a biographical article by Alison; or one of Professor Wilson's sketches in his "Recreations of Christopher North."
The essayists wrote principally what we should now look upon as sermons, or moral teachings, and yet very many of their papers are unfit to be read in a mixed society. Men and women were made then of coarser stuff than we. Their eyes and ears were less sensitive.
But, as time went on, although it continued to be a newspaper, gradually more room was given to fiction than to fact, and to essays on all manner of subjects than to the news of the day. For Addison is among the greatest of our essayists. But although these essays were often meant to teach something, neither Steele nor Addison are always trying to be moral or enforce a lesson.
Newspaper essayists assert that the young men of the day are to blame for this; that the young men like it; and the fair husband-anglers dress their flies in the colours most likely to attract a nibble.
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