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Updated: May 31, 2025
One reason for the disability of the essayist, as distinguished from the preacher or the journalist, is that he does not give himself range enough. Expecting to keep scrupulously to one subject, he cannot put his hand on a theme which he is sure will hold out under him to the end. Once it was not so. The essayists of antiquity were the most vagariously garrulous people imaginable.
The same thing has happened to the most vigorous of essayists, Macaulay, and the most vigorous of romancers, Dickens, because we live in a time when mere vigour is considered a vulgar thing. The same idle and frigid reaction will almost certainly discredit the stateliness and care of Tennyson, as it has discredited the recklessness and inventiveness of Dickens.
She appears to have formed her notions of its probable consequences from some of the papers in the "British Essayists," "The Rambler," "The Mirror," or "The Lounger," which may have been among the English classics on the parsonage bookshelves; for she evidently imagines that an entire change of character for the worse is the usual effect of a visit to "the great metropolis," and is delighted to find that "E." is "E." still.
However, I am doubtful about employing essayists as office-boys. It might work badly." "Has it, sir?" he asked; then in an embarrassed manner, "I am not certain what you mean." The lawyer made no reply, and Hal turned away crestfallen. "O come back here, boy," called out Mr. Bryce then. "And by the way, can you tell me who is Nisus Sum?"
Still he was in the Temple, that classic region rendered famous by the "Spectator" and other essayists, as the abode of gay wits and thoughtful men of letters; and which, with its retired courts and embowered gardens, in the very heart of a noisy metropolis, is, to the quiet-seeking student and author, an oasis freshening with verdure in the midst of a desert.
The poets are not only singers, but leaders; they hold up an ideal, and they compel men to recognize and follow it. The novelists tell a story which pictures human life, and at the same time call us to the work Of social reform, or drive home a moral lesson. The essayists are nearly all prophets or teachers, and use literature as the chief instrument of progress and education.
The English essayists have spent a good deal of time lately in discussing the question whether it is possible to tell a good contemporary book from a bad one.
Every word or sentence is made a peg to hang something else on. Our authors are too fond of showing off reading or curious information; the style of the old essayists " "Bald and tame, with very little knowledge of the finer shades of character," interrupted Mr. Malcolm. "I wonder why you, as a critic, can compare our brilliant modern literature to such poor performances."
In the wicked old days when the States took British books without paying for them they used to take them in large numbers, but now that they have turned honest and passed a law allowing the British author copyright on certain terms, they have in great measure ceased to take; for, by the strangest of coincidences, no sooner were British novels, histories, essays, and the like, protected in America, than there sprang up in the States themselves, novelists, historians, and essayists, not only numerous enough to supply their own home markets, but talented enough to cross the Atlantic in large numbers and challenge us in our own.
Swift, Fielding, Hogarth, Sterne, and Goldsmith, in the last century, reached at times a more enduring level of humour without caricature; but the gift has been more rarely imparted to their successors in the age of steam. Now, we shall never get an adequate definition of that imponderable term humour a term which, perhaps, was invented to be the eternal theme of budding essayists.
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