the essayists who wrote for the Tatler and the Spectator added several others tales of real life, elaborate classical and oriental Types of allegories, letters and diaries of correspondents, typical essays moral and social " characters," reports of the conversation of London coffee-houses and tea-tables. The result was that, instead of papers constructed more or less on the same pattern, they were able to give their readers a considerable number of distinct types of essays. They were particularly fond of what Addison called papers of morality," that is to say, discourses devoted primarily to the exposition Moralizing of some general ethical principle or quality, such as modessays esty, cheerfulness, hypocrisy, affectation. In writing them they followed no single method; sometimes they developed their central theme in a formal, orderly way, with illustrations from the classics, the Scriptures, or the more serious modern authors; sometimes they contented themselves with simply suggesting, in paragraphs devoid of concrete detail, a few of its significant phases. Their models, so far as they were dependent upon any, were to be found in part among the writings of the earlier essayists - Bacon in particular furnished them many hints of method - and in part among the sermons of the great English divines of the preceding generation. Many of the features of the "papers of morality" characterized also another type of essays much cultivated in the periodicals Critical essays in literary criticism. These were of two classes, according as the starting point was a general literary idea or a particular work. Both classes were marked by like qualities of composition— great explicitness of plan, ample illustration, and abundant generalization. essays essays A third type of paper, somewhat less abstract than these two, included essays made up of general reflections interspersed with "charCharacter acters." This type was peculiarly Steele's; whenever, from early in the Tatler to the end of the Spectator, he had occasion to treat of the broader aspects of social life — types of character, good breeding, conversation - it was in this mold. that he tended to cast his thought. As in the model of the genre, Les Caractères of La Bruyère, the function of the "characters was primarily illustrative. They were embedded in the reflections, sometimes one in an essay, sometimes several. In manner, too, they owed much to La Bruyère. All his favorite devices of exposition - dialogue, apostrophe, description, narrative-reappeared in the work of Steele and his imitators. Even the names were largely of the same type. For a few characters who bore English names, such as Will Nice, Tom Folio, Ned Softly, there were numerous others Clarissa, Nobilis, Senecio, Urbanus, Flavia, Eusebius — who clearly belonged with La Bruyère's Romans and Greeks. Such, in general, were the typical character-essays of the Tatler and the Spectator. In addition there were a few others, such as the account of the club at the Trumpet and the description of Mr. Spectator's friends, in which the portraits were presented for their own sake, independently of any general ideas they might serve to illustrate. But papers of this sort appeared too infrequently to constitute a separate type. ९९ Sometimes, again, the essayist, instead of pointing his moral with a character," employed for the same purpose an incident or scene Anecdotal from his observation of the life around him. Thus, essays Addison, who perhaps made most use of the device, introduced his remarks on popular superstitions in Spectator 7 with an account of a conversation at a friend's dinner table. In this case the anecdote preceded the reflections, which were represented as rising naturally out of it; in other cases the order was reversed. Whatever the order, the moral of the essay commonly appeared as subsidiary to the concrete happening which started the essayist's train of thought. Letter essays Still another group of essays was made up of those containing letters from correspondents, real or imaginary. This type, a favorite with all contributors, flourished in several varieties. Sometimes the essayist presented his correspondent's words without comment; sometimes he added remarks of his own, intended to supplement or enforce the point of the letter. In many cases one letter only was given; in others the paper contained several, all perhaps dealing with different subjects. Nor were the letters themselves all of the same pattern. Some were sketches of character, others were requests for advice, still others were narratives of real life or satirical accounts of contemporary fashions and conditions. Finally, the Tatler and the Spectator contained a great many essays of a type predominantly narrative. Some, perhaps most, of these dealt with simple incidents of everyday life set in a background Narrative essays of contemporary manners. Such, for example, were the accounts of Jenny Distaff's love affair and marriage, and the story of Orlando, in the Tatler; and the narratives of Mr. Spectator's visit to Sir Roger de Coverley's country place and of the old knight's return journey to London, in the Spectator. For the most part in these narrative papers the element of moralizing was slight, though it was nearly always present; and the interest of the essays for both writers and readers lay in their faithful pictures of the habits and acts of ordinary English people. Not all of the narratives in the periodicals, however, were of this realistic sort. With the serious-minded readers of the early eighteenth century few essays enjoyed a greater vogue than those cast in the form of visions or oriental allegories. Steele experimented with this type in one or two papers early in the Tatler; but it remained for Addison to develop it into a finished medium for the expression of moral and religious ideas. These, then, were some of the typical forms into which the writers for the Tatler and the Spectator cast their ethical teaching and their critical comment on the life of the day. They were not, however, always content to limit themselves to these main types. On the contrary, they never ceased to invent new devices, which they employed perhaps no more than once or twice and then completely neglected. To this class of special essays belonged, in the Tatler, the papers on the Court of Honor, on the adventures of a shilling, and on frozen words; in the Spectator, the journal of the Indian kings, the anatomy of the coquette's heart, the diary of Clarinda, the minutes of the Everlasting Club, and the account of Pug the Monkey. Taken all together they furnished a striking manifestation of the diversity of method and device which the new conditions of publication made characteristic of the essay. The later history of the periodical essay When the daily issue of the Spectator came to an end in December, 1712, the eighteenth-century essay in all its varieties was fully formed. Thenceforward for over a hundred years the history of the familiar essay in England was the history of the imitations made of this fixed and established type. Many, perhaps most, of these imitations appeared in singlesheet journals modeled closely on the Tatler; by 1809 no less than 220 such periodicals had seen the light in London and other cities of the British Isles. Of the early ventures of this type the most notable were the Guardian (1713), edited by Steele and written by him in conjunction with Addison, Pope, and others, and the revived Spectator (1714), the work almost entirely of Addison. Then for a number of years the single-sheet papers took on a prevailingly political character, the reflection in large measure of the bitter party strife which raged under the first two Georges; and familiar essays, though they continued to appear, became almost swamped under the stream of purely controversial writing. Toward the middle of the century, however, journals of a more general nature again came into vogue. The Champion (1739-1741), a semi-political paper to which the chief contributor was Henry Fielding, was followed by the Rambler (1750-1752), a strictly literary production, written almost entirely by Dr. Johnson; the Covent-Garden Journal (1752), another enterprise of Fielding's; the Adventurer (1752–1754), a journal edited by John Hawkesworth with the aid of Johnson; the World (17531756); the Connoisseur (1754-1756); the Bee (1759); the Mirror (1779-1780); the Lounger (1785-1787); the Observer (17851790); and numerous others to the end of the century. But journals of this sort were not the only repositories in which the imitators of Addison and Steele published their works. Many essays of the Tatler and Spectator type appeared in the somewhat restricted columns of the daily and weekly newspapers; it was in a newspaper, for example, that Johnson printed his Idler papers, and Goldsmith his Letters from a Citizen of the World. Many also appeared in the monthly magazines which in constantly increasing numbers followed in the wake of the successful Gentleman's Magazine (founded 1731). And a few writers resorted to the practice, universal in the seventeenth century, of publishing essays for the first time in volumes. To this last class belonged Vicesimus Knox, whose Essays Moral and Literary (1778-1779) revealed a marked admiration for the great masters of the periodical form. Of the many essayists who in the middle and later years of the eighteenth century carried on the traditions of Addison and Steele, two won in a peculiar measure the admiration of their contemporaries Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith. Johnson's career as a familiar essayist fell entirely within the decade of the fifties. In 1750 he began to publish the Rambler, a paper of the type of the Tatler and the Spectator; it ran until 1752, and though only moderately successful when first issued, took its Samuel place as one of the standard essay-collections of the cen tury when reprinted in volumes. Between 1752 and 1754 (1709-1784) he contributed a number of papers to Hawkesworth's Adventurer, and in 1758 he started in a weekly newspaper a series of essays entitled The Idler, which continued to appear during two years. In all of these ventures Johnson's aims closely resembled those of the great essayists of the beginning of the century. The name "periodical mentor," which he frequently applied to himself, exactly expressed the spirit and purpose of his work; he wrote primarily to satirize and correct. In his methods of composition, too, he approved himself a faithful follower of Addison and Steele, writing papers of morality," oriental apologues, sketches of domestic life, character-essays, criticisms, letters, with little if any deviation from the model which they had set. Only in two respects, indeed, did his practice differ markedly from theirs. For one thing, though he did not entirely withhold his satire from the lighter aspects of social life, ९९ witness the letter in the Rambler from the young lady who found country life a bore, and the Dick Minim papers in the Idler,— still his preference was for subjects of a serious moral and religious import abstraction and self-examination, patience, the folly of anticipating misfortunes. Again, the style in which he clothed his thoughts, especially in the Rambler, drew little of its inspiration from the polished but colloquial English of the Tatler and the Spectator. Though he was to write, in The Lives of the Poets, perhaps the most sympathetic appreciation of the qualities of Addison's style which the eighteenth century produced, in his own work he strove for a stateliness and balance of rhythm and a Latinized dignity of vocabulary quite remote from the simplicity and ease of his predecessor. Goldsmith appeared before the public as an essayist almost a decade later than Johnson. He began to contribute to the Monthly Oliver Review and other periodicals in 1757, but his characteristic manner first became manifest in a number of miscellaneous papers which he wrote in 1759 for a shortlived journal called The Bee. In 1760 and 1761 he contributed to the Public Ledger a series of 123 letters purporting to be written by a philosophical Chinaman sojourning in England, which were later |