criticism, in her occasional philosophizing, she is everlastingly drawing portraits. In the essay "My French School Days," where we learn that she came of a people who loved languages, we are given not only a sympathetic interpretation of the French method of education "by discovery" but are introduced to some very interesting persons as well. Her learning all through life seems to have been by a method of discovery. In the childhood home so tenderly described in the essay "Guests" she was educated most of all by the guests constantly coming and going in accordance with the hospitable custom of the times. And how we come to know these guests! "Miss Lou Brooks," for example, that "glass of fashion and mould of form," was to her five-year-old eyes the embodiment of all the world's beauty. Then came into her life "Doctor Highway," who "would be classified readily now as a Christian gentleman of highest honor, brilliant gifts, and scientific attainments. But the name scientist was not in those days worn so easily. Huxley and Darwin were old but yet alive, as were many who still believed them to be emissaries of the devil." And how she was thrilled when the Doctor crashed his fist upon the table at a careless touch on his ideas of truth. Then there was the "young Byronic musician with the extraordinary tenor voice," who wrote in her autograph book, "Music, my only love, the only bride I'll ever claim," but who later "seemed to have repented his resolve and forgotten the album, for . . . he claimed some two brides besides music. This, however, did not alter his educational value; that remained unspoiled." The next guest of impor

tance was poor Mrs. Rankin, "born untimely, cut off by the custom of those days from the delights of militancy, foredoomed to pass out of life with never the joy of smashing a single window." The writer's power of hero worship was soon after awakened by the poet Eugene Ashton, who "had been into distant countries of the soul," whose gray eyes were "as young as the young moon and as many centuries old," and whose death gave "new splendor to the dead."

Besides these guests of friendship there were the relatives, great-uncles and great-aunts who "brought with them the spirits of ancestors" and "lent a dignity to life." "Aunt Sarah” had about her "the refinement and delicacy of a rare old vase." "Great-aunt Henrietta" was "a living chronicle, an accurate if inglorious historian; a sort of Pepys in petticoats and neckerchief." This contact with friends and relatives was for her a real education. "I am convinced," she writes, "that it was mainly by my reading of these men and women with whom the world of my childhood was peopled and whom the gracious habit of visiting brought within my ken, that I came later to recognize and enjoy the best authors and the best literature." The conclusion of this essay is superb in its tribute to the Master "in whose House of Life we do but for a time visit, . . . some adding truth or dignity of our own; some possessed of foibles and accomplished in failures all of us understood, condoned, valued, pitied, loved by the Master of the House."

The whimsical little book Adventures in Indigence is a riot of characters, quaint, modern, good, bad, but all

most human. One desires to rename some of the essays. "Musgrove" could be "A degenerous Gentleman"; "Margharetta," "A foolish Parent"; "Mamie Faffelfinger," "A foolish Virgin,"—so much has the writer caught the spirit of the seventeenth-century character essayists. Human nature is such an old-fashioned modernism; and as regards universal characteristics of humanity there is nothing new under the sun. There is Ernest, now, wanting royal opportunity. "To be sober, trustworthy, honorable, daily dependable—these were too trifling! Give him something worthy of his powers." Then there is Margaret, "so bent, since the foundation of the world, on proving herself right and everybody else wrong . . . a very piece of humanity— humanity, the ancient, the amusing, the faulty, the pathetic, the endeared." Laura Spencer Portor has caught the true relation of life to literature, and she finds in her adventures among the poor many persons whom she knew first in stories. "Deal with them but long enough, and you shall have strange suspicions. You shall begin to note a growing and undeniable likeness in these to 'Cinderella' and 'The Youngest Brother.' Nor are these fairy tales, mind you, safe and unbelievable, but fairy tales potent and indisputable . . . hanging out your clothes of a Monday." This writer makes one sigh for more books from her pen. She is so sweetly, tenderly human in all her ways, but most of all in her understanding and interpretation of the heart of childhood. And is not the child the heart of humanity?

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CHAPTER IV

THE CLASSIC ESSAY

Books are the immortal sons defying their sires.- PLATO

BACKGROUND

The classic essay had a long and troubled infancy. Romanticism, its arch-enemy, numbering among its allies the political, the social, and the moral forces of the times, won over the early Elizabethan dramatists from the disposition to make the English drama conform to Senecan models. Literature being the reflection of life, the struggle of romanticism or freedom of thought against the intellectual monarchy erected by the Italian and French dramatists and critics of the Renaissance upon a thorough misunderstanding and misinterpretation of Greek dramaturgy—a monarchy which, frankly aristocratic, bound literature under its unbending rules-is paralleled by the revolt of the newborn democratic spirit in politics, which won its hard-fought battle against despotism through the establishment of the English Commonwealth. This spirit is also reflected in the Reformation, of which the chief aim was to make every man his own law in regard to his soul. The Elizabethan dramatists, though they achieved romanticism in their technique, in their limit

less scope of subject matter, and in their freedom of spirit, retained the English ideals of monarchy in their character drawing. How few of Shakespeare's heroes and heroines are of other than the blood royal! But the dramatists of the Commonwealth and of the Restoration, in accordance with the new spirit of democracy, began to see the importance of the common man as a possible character in the play. However, the drama had in the meantime fallen into such disrepute because of its degenerating into a mere political organ and because of Puritan disapproval that its force in literature became insignificant. Its one great master among the inferior contemporaries and successors of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, took his stand for "classic art," and his school carried on his tradition through the confused and pessimistic years of the Puritan Age, when all England trembled at the beheading of a king and at the abyss of Hell with its many heretofore unperceived avenues now made known by stern-voiced preachers— avenues down which an avenging God, who was thought to deny all the helpful restraints of grace, was driving His terror-stricken creatures.

Encouraged by a long-surviving prejudice among lovers of literature against the "degradation" of literary forms in the attempt to model them along romantic and democratic lines, and strengthened at intervals by the tonic qualities of style of a Sir Thomas Browne and a Milton, classicism prolonged its feeble existence through the severe years of the Commonwealth, the laxity of the Restoration, and suddenly attained its full strength in the Queen Anne period, to which it gave its name,