of gallantry? Where more care to appear in the foremost box with greater advantage of dress? where more meetings of business? where more bargains driven of all sorts? and where so many conveniences or enticements to sleep?"

The flaming scorn, the almost snarling bitterness of Swift's voice are as plainly apparent as the chuckles with which Irving tells about the Christmas music at Squire Bracebridge's church:

"The usual services of the choir were managed tolerably well, the vocal parts generally lagging a little behind the instrumental, and some loitering fiddler now and then making up for lost time by travelling over a passage with prodigious celerity. . . . But the great trial was an anthem that had been prepared and arranged by Master Simon, and on which he had founded great expectation. Unluckily there was a blunder at the very outset; the musicians became flurried; Master Simon was in a fever; everything went on lamely and irregularly until they came to a chorus beginning, 'Now let us sing with one accord,' which seemed to be a signal for parting company: all became discord and confusion; each shifted for himself, and got to the end as well, or, rather, as soon as he could, excepting one old chorister in a pair of horn spectacles, bestriding and pinching a long sonorous nose; who happened to stand a little apart, and, being wrapped up in his own melody, kept on a quavering course, wriggling his head, ogling his book, and winding all up by a nasal solo of at least three bars' duration."

And equally clear is the gentle compassion in Thackeray's voice as he tells of the lock of Stella's hair which Swift inclosed in paper marked, "Only a woman's hair":

"Do these words indicate indifference or an attempt to hide feeling? Did you ever hear or read four words more pathetic? Only a woman's hair; only love, only fidelity, only purity, innocence, beauty; only the tenderest heart in the world stricken and wounded, and passed away now out of reach of pangs of hope deferred, love insulted, and pitiless desertion:-only that lock of hair left.

"And yet to have had so much love, he must have given some. Treasures of wit and wisdom, and tenderness, too, must that man

have had locked up in the caverns of his gloomy heart, and shown fitfully to one or two whom he took in there. . . . He shrank away from all affections sooner or later. . . . He broke from his fastest friend, Sheridan; he slunk away from his fondest admirer, Pope. His laugh jars on one's ear after seven score years. He was always alone alone and gnashing in the darkness, except when Stella's sweet smile came and shone upon him. When that went, silence and utter night closed over him. An immense genius: an awful downfall and ruin. So great a man he seems to me, that thinking of him is like thinking of an empire falling."

In the essay, then, the feelings as well as the ideas of the writer are apparent. Everything is direct, informal, personal. If the writer, like Addison, is an urbane, cultured, witty gentleman of the world, that urbanity, that culture, that sophisticated wit are bound to appear. If, like Irving, he is genial, kindly, sentimental, whole-hearted, these qualities appear in his essays. The principal charm of Lamb's writings lies in the whimsical, imaginative, tender, humorous personality that shines from every page. The enthusiasms, prejudices, and idealism of Emerson can be felt directly. The rough-shod vigor of Carlyle is reflected in the jolt of his sentences and the incoherence of his exclamations. Stevenson's enthusiasms, his courage, his egotism, are all as much a part of his essays as are their subject matter.

Being personal, the essay also permits greater variety of treatment than the other forms of prose. Here are no rules, Variety and free- no elaborate technique, no vocabulary of terms dom of treatment to be studied. The essayist writes as he pleases. He may organize his material carefully and present it logically. But he is under no obligation to do so. There is for him no fixed standard. He may improvise as he sees fit. Sometimes it is difficult to find any general plan of progress in an essay-the only definite thing about it is the impression of a mood or idea illustrated in different lights from the facets of a brilliant mind; at other times the plan of

organization is obvious from the start. The style is varied, too, as varied as the subject matter and the moods of the writers. Thus we find Addison writing in a style that is both smooth and dignified:

"When I look upon the tombs of the great, every emotion of envy dies in me; . . . when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tomb of the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow; when I see kings lying by those who deposed them, when I consider rival wits placed side by side, or the holy men that divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions, and debates of mankind. When I read the several dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great day when we shall all of us be contemporaries, and make our appearance together."

In a rich poetic style Sir Thomas Browne writes:

"But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the Pyramids? Herostratus lives that burnt the Temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it; Time hath spared the Epitaph of Adrian's horse, confounded that of himself. In vain we compute our felicities by the advantage of our good names, since bad have equal durations. Who knows whether the best of men be known? or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time? Without the favour of the everlasting Register the first man had been as unknown as the last, and Methuselah's long life had been his only Chronicle. .. The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the Equinox?"

Quite different is the style of Lamb, who, even when he is not whimsical, writes with a light and delicate touch:

"Those who have only seen Mrs. Jordan within the last ten . . . years, can have no adequate notion of her performance of such parts

as

Viola. Her joyous parts-in which her memory now chiefly lives—in her youth were outdone by her plaintive ones. There is no giving an account how she delivered the disguised story of her love for Orsino. It was no set speech, that she had foreseen, so as to weave it into an harmonious period, line necessarily following line, to make up the music-yet I have heard it so spoken, or rather read, not without its grace and beauty-but, when she had declared her sister's history to be a 'blank,' and that she 'never told her love' there was a pause, as if the story had ended-and then the image of the 'worm in the bud' came up as a new suggestion-and the heightened image of 'Patience' still followed after that as by some growing (and not mechanical) process, thought springing up after thought, I would almost say, as they were watered by her tears. So in those fine lines

Write loyal cantons of contemned love-
Halloo your name to the reverberate hills-

there was no preparation made in the foregoing image for that which was to follow. She used no rhetoric in her passion; or it was nature's own rhetoric, most legitimate then, when it seemed altogether without rule or law."

Far removed from the bitter harshness of Swift, the whimsical sentiment of Lamb, the amused tolerance of Washington Irving, is the earnest vigor of Carlyle who writes:

"My brother, the brave man has to give his Life away. Give it, I advise thee;-thou dost not expect to sell thy Life in an adequate manner? What price, for example, would content thee? The just price of thy LIFE to thee,-why, God's entire Creation to thyself, the whole Universe of Space, the whole Eternity of Time, and what they hold: that is the price which would content thee; that, and if thou wilt be candid, nothing short of that! It is thy all; and for it thou wouldst have all. Thou art an unreasonable mortal;— or rather thou art a poor infinite mortal, who, in thy narrow clayprison here, seemest so unreasonable! Thou wilt never sell thy Life, or any part of thy Life, in a satisfactory manner. Give it, like a royal heart; let the price be Nothing: thou hast then, in a certain sense, got All for it!"

The essay as a

reflection of its

age

As the essay expresses the mood and personality of its author, so it expresses the mood and personality of the age in which he lived. Like Swift, a writer may be out of sympathy with his age, but he is, in spite of himself, the creature of it. He cannot help revealing it as well as himself. He cannot write his reactions to the life about him without showing what that life was like: what men did, what things in life interested and moved them, what their ideas of literature, science, government, society, and religion were.

In the seventeenth century, when men were moved by moral and philosophical motives forgotten in the crowded excitement and adventure of the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery that had preceded, the essay was usually the expression of the writer's personal attitude toward moral, philosophical, or religious questions. Thus, Sir Francis Bacon, a contemporary of Shakespeare, writes:

"The virtue of prosperity is temperance; the virtue of adversity is fortitude. . . . Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; and adversity is not without comforts and hopes. . . . Certainly virtue is like precious odours, most fragrant when they are incensed or crushed: for prosperity doth best discover vice; but adversity doth best discover virtue."

And Jeremy Taylor, the eminent divine, meditates on death:

"A man may read a sermon, the best and most passionate that ever man preached, if he shall but enter into the sepulchres of kings. In the same Escurial where the Spanish princes live in greatness and power, and decree war or peace, they have wisely placed a cemetery, where their ashes and their glory shall sleep till time shall be no more; and where our kings have been crowned, their ancestors lie interred, and they must walk over their grandsire's head to take his crown. There is an acre sown with royal seed, the copy of the greatest change, from rich to naked, from ceiled roofs to arched coffins, from living like gods to die like men. . . . There the warlike and the peaceful, the fortunate and the miserable, the beloved