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Updated: May 31, 2025
When I started in to write this chapter, I meant to conclude it with an apology for my audacity in undertaking in any wise to sum up the local characteristics of a country where I had tarried for so short a time, but I have changed my mind about that. I have merely borrowed a page from the book of rules of the British essayists and novelists who come over here to write us up.
All the classical essayists wrote with a quill, and Addison used the most expensive kind the Government purchased. And the beginning of the inferior essay was the dawn of the cheap steel pen. The quill nibs they sell to fit into ordinary pen-holders are no true quills at all, lacking dignity, and may even lead you into the New Humour if you trust overmuch to their use.
Some history, some sociology, some Spencer, some Huxley, some Haeckel, a small textbook of geology, a considerable proportion of pure literature, Morley's edition of lives of literary men, the English essayists in a nice set, Shakespeare in many forms and so much poetry that at a glance his library was all poetry.
What a revelation of the taste of our age is found in the new love of highly spiced literature! All history holds no nobler literature than that in the English tongue. Our poetry furnishes nectar for angels! Our philosophies bread for giants! The essayists furnish food for the gods! Nevertheless, a multitude have turned from this glorious feast to the highly spiced literature of fiction.
"Dear John Levine, I couldn't be cold to you. Nothing could make me love you less. And you yourself told me to be true to myself." John sighed, then said abruptly, "Let's never discuss it again. What are you reading now, Lydia?" "English essayists and Emerson. I'm crazy about Emerson. He seems so much more human than Leigh Hunt and De Quincey and the rest of them.
She had been educated at home, and her knowledge of the world was derived from inference and by inspiration. Of such is the precious, small group of essayists made. While she talked to me I kept brushing my fingers, trying, unconsciously, to rid them guiltily of the absent dust from the half-calf backs of Lamb, Chaucer, Hazlitt, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne and Hood.
And if the novelists and essayists have raised a mist about the sex, which it willingly masquerades in, is it not time that the scientists should determine whether the mystery exists in nature or only in the imagination? The Drawer has never undervalued clothes.
The growth of the scientific spirit has made such thought and such language seem unreal in serious literature, and prevents a later generation from imitating, though not from admiring, the brilliance of the early essayists. Hazlitt's genius was of a heavier type.
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.
The essayists, too, offered nothing new, though their number was legion. Both collections are distinguished by their simple but elegant style. The short story was popular among the greater gentry; it abandoned the popular style it had in the Ming epoch, and adopted the polished language of scholars.
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