to further the distinction between the familiar essay on the one hand and the critical and biographical on the other. Finally, Lamb brought the essay to the heights, and Stevenson helped to secure it immortal foothold thereon.

Americans were too busy conquering their continent to write essays before the late eighteenth century, at which period, however, they began to make up for lost time. Induced by characteristic impulse "to try anything once," they succeeded, within some fifty years, in developing all the types of essay. Irving, in the judgment of Europeans our most noteworthy man of letters, adhered to the journalistic type then so popular in England. Emerson, though linked up with the aphorists in his lack of continuity of thought, his desire to give expression to single truths whether closely related or not, is biographical and critical in his subject matter. It would be tedious here to run down the lineThoreau, Lowell, Holmes, Howells, Repplier, and Huneker are some of them-till we come to the most modern of the moderns, those rapid-fire essayists, who leave us fairly breathless and who make the current magazines a veritable mental feast. (Truly the essay has today come into its own, and its triumph is most evident in the fact that even the young are coming to believe that a book with neither conversation nor pictures may yet be so fascinating as to compel immediate and entire perusal.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Practically all the writers that are to be considered in this book have written something on the subject of style. The author has culled out occasional sentences from them which she considers especially helpful. Some of the books on the art of writing that deserve investigation are The Art of Writing English, by Meiklejohn; English Composition, by Barrett Wendell; Word and Phrase, by Fitzgerald; Specimens of Prose Composition, by Nutter, Hersey, and Greenough; English Composition in Theory and Practice, by Canby and others; The Writer's Art, by Rollo W. Brown.

CHAPTER II

THE APHORISTIC ESSAY

Learning we find in books, but wisdom in ourselves.-SPALDING

BACKGROUND

The constellations in the literary firmament were most propitiously arranged when the essay was born into the fine old family of English literature. Let us not imagine, however, that the charming literary essay, so familiar to us moderns, whose ears have been spoiled by the musical cadences of a Stevenson, whose sense of humor can take its delight in the sweet-hearted, evergraceful playfulness of a Lamb, and whose minds have come to demand that profound truth in literature shall be delivered to us in the soul-stirring splendor of a Newman, let us not imagine that this lovely creature sprang full-panoplied from the Jovelike brow of that wisest of Englishmen, its immediate progenitor, Lord Francis Bacon. Bacon was a man of so many and so great affairs that the birth of this happy child of his brain, notwithstanding its importance to us, seems to have been but the merest incident to him. Above all, let us, who live in these days when English literary art is, as Thompson predicts, in danger of "dwindling to the extinction of unendurable excellence," beware lest

we be tempted to put on the monocle of superiority to stare in literary horror at the general loose-jointedness and the graceless apparel of Bacon's essay-child, for we may soon find ourselves as disconcerted in the presence of this true daughter of her father as if we should discover ourselves condescending to an encyclopedia ! Perhaps it will be just as well to let her speak for herself, however, and to consider, in preparation for our acquaintance with her, the times in which she was born.

Bacon lived in the Elizabethan period when, because of the "flowery crop of knowledge and new light sprung up and yet springing daily," England, according to Milton, should have been seen "rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks." It is not surprising that Milton, a Puritan of the Puritans, considered the Middle Ages as an intellectual sleep and the Protestant Reformation as an awakening; nor is it questionable that Milton himself was, as he shows in this same Areopagitica, very much awake to the trend of the times. There is no doubt of the economic awakening which occurred during the reign of Elizabeth. The rapid growth of manufacturing was giving employment to thousands of persons who were idle and discontented because of the conditions resulting from the breaking up of the medieval system of industry; exploration had increased trade, and increased trade was directing men's minds to further exploration, which was in its turn made possible by political peace at home and abroad,—changes which created a leisured class with an outlook broadened by contact with other nations. Even in religious matters there was an ap

proach toward peace. Elizabeth was a wise woman, albeit a vain, frivolous, and unscrupulous one; and though as liberal in head-chopping as the rest of her illustrious family, she managed to conciliate to some extent both Catholics and Protestants and to give to both offices of state. After the defeat of the Spanish Armada Protestantism was firmly established in England, and persecution of Catholics began to assume the modern methods of spiritual and moral rather than of physical violence; and though religious unrest continued because so much of England was still Catholic, there was comparative peace. In addition to the economic and religious prosperity, the art of printing was scattering among the masses the literary wealth of the ages. As a result of all these changes England was well ready for the essayist, with his leisurely habit of mind, his knowledge of men and of books; ready for his writing, not through stress of passionate impulse, but through sheer enjoyment of putting down on paper the well-digested learning, the allusions, and the references which are the fruitage of years of literary garnering.

Though we call Bacon the father of the essay in English, we must not forget its more remote ancestry, an ancestry sheltered from prying eyes in that same obscurity which veils the authorship of practically all old English literature. Because of this obscurity we shall have to content ourselves with generalization. In the Middle Ages the art of bookmaking was too costly to let the written essay supplant oral instruction to any great extent, and as a result culture was confined almost exclusively to the monasteries and universities. "The