he writes of Milton than when he writes of Popular Superstitions. Of the word Essay it is necessary to say something, because at different times it has borne different meanings. Johnson's definition of it as * a loose sally of the mind; an irregular undigested piece', covered its employment by authors to excuse shortcomings, and to disarm the critic in his examination of a work which boasted of no pretence to literature. Some such idea of admitted or implied failure in a worthy experiment adhered to Montaigne's use of the word in those Essais which were published in 1580. But the decay of this sense began in fact with this publication, although the author expressed his apology for being 'something fantastical'. For that very wandering from point to point which in Montaigne was a habit of mind, was developed by the English essayists of the eighteenth century into a deliberate study. Out of what Montaigne would have been only too pleased to call 'irregularity and want of finish' they invented a literary quality which in Goldsmith rose to a perfection of carelessness in approaching and retreating from a subject. It was in another direction from that taken by Montaigne and his followers that Bacon enlarged the meaning of the word essay in literature. He applied it to his pieces not in the sense of 'an experiment', but in the sense of a test or assay'. He weighed and examined his subjects one by one. With the grip of his intellect he clung to each separate subject as to a rock while he treated of it, refusing to dip to the invading wave of kindred ideas by which it was surrounded. In the dedication of his second edition of pieces to Prince Henry of Wales in 1612 he wrote of them as brief notes, set down rather significantly than curiously, which I have called Essays. The word is late, but the thing is ancient'. And he went on to point out that Seneca's epistles to Lucilius were, if read aright, nothing but essays. Informed by the spirit of this definition we should have found it no very difficult task to include in this collection a number of letters or lectures of which at least Addison or Steele would have been ready to admit that if one mark them well' they are but essays. With the aid of such freedom we should have been able to represent women writers much more adequately than by stricter adherence to a verbal distinction in nomenclature. By a slightly more reckless exercise of this freedom we could have included many a public discourse or many a chapter complete in itself from a work comprising a number of kindred subjects. We have preferred, however, to interpret our task in a narrower spirit, consoling ourselves with the reflection that the more we had widened our field (and most regretfully was Sterne excluded), the more arbitrary to many a reader must have appeared our selection. We have in more than one instance chosen essays on subjects closely akin, in order to compare their treatment by contemporaries or men of different epochs. Acknowledgement is due to those who have kindly permitted the inclusion of more recent essays to Messrs. Chatto & Windus for the two Essays by R. L. Stevenson, A Plea for Gas Lamps and The English Admirals, from Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers, and to Messrs. Scribner & Co. for permission to circulate the volume containing them in the United States; to Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton for Morris's Life and Death of Jason by A. C. Swinburne; to Messrs. William Blackwood & Sons for the Essay on Authorship by George Eliot; to Messrs. George Allen & Sons for Ruskin's Protest against the Extension of Railways in the Lake District; to Messrs. Duckworth & Co. for The July Grass by Richard Jefferies; to Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co. for Personal Style from Essays Speculative and Suggestive by J. A. Symonds; to Miss Edith Sichel for Miss Coleridge's Travellers' Tales; and to Mr. Wilfrid Meynell for permission to represent Francis Thompson by The Way of Imperfection. Mr. Makower had not long been engaged on a selection of English essays, when his regretted death left this fruit of his taste and experience in the forming. |