few hours ago were crowded! But who are these that make the street their couch, and find a short repose from wretchedness at the doors of the opulent? They are strangers, wanderers, and orphans, whose circumstances are too humble to expect redress, and whose distresses are too great even for pity. Some are without the covering even of rags, and others emaciated with disease; the world has disclaimed them; society turns its back upon their distress, and has given them up to nakedness and hunger. . . . Why, why was I born a man, and yet see the suffering of wretches I cannot relieve! Poor houseless creatures! The world will give you reproaches, but will not give you relief!" No pseudonym can conceal for a moment the vital autobiographic truth of this picture. It has the poignant pathos of personal confession, it is the houseless Goldsmith himself we see, the ill-paid drudge, drifting helpless through the populous Infernos of London misery, and finding his only shelter among the outcasts and beggars of Axe Lane.

Charles Lamb inherits the tradition of Goldsmith and extends it. He also writes under a pseudonym which is the most transparent of disguises. It will be observed, however, that he has none of Goldsmith's world-wideness, nor has he Goldsmith's delicate sense of natural beauty. He is a city-dweller, essentially local in spirit, who boldly confesses, in a day when a new movement toward Nature was attracting men like Wordsworth and Coleridge, and in a more limited degree Byron and Shelley, that he prefers Fleet Street to Skiddaw. It is hard to place Lamb, for he was an exotic. His style, in its suggestive quaintness, is a harking back to Fuller and Sir Thomas Browne. His method, however, and the nature of his themes, relate him vitally to the familiar essay. He uses the essay with the utmost freedom; indulges his sentiment, whim, and fancy

without restraint; can be grotesque, eloquent, pathetic in turn; is very much of a conscious humourist, whose humour expresses itself in a kind of genial irresponsibility, which is best described by the word " fun." He sees everything at so odd an angle that all he writes is intimately personal, and his charm lies in this constant intimate revelation of himself. He can be wise and tender; but he is delightfully boyish in his good spirits, his love of laughter, his quick sense of the ridiculous. Perhaps the word "delightful" best expresses his charm; he is "the gentle Elia," who is either our friend or makes no appeal whatever

to us.

Thoreau is a writer who has never received from his countrymen the praise to which he is entitled, probably because the man himself has not been truly understood. In the year 1845 he built for himself a hut on the shore of Walden Pond, and commenced the life of the solitary, which lasted for two years. Here he read assiduously, studied Nature intimately, and arrived at certain truths about the simplification of life which were to constitute his message to the world. On his return to society, after great difficulty and long search he found a publisher for his first book-A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers. The book was not appreciated, and found few readers. A few years later he gathered together the greater part of his first editions, stored them in a garret, and wrote in his journal, "I have now a library of 900 volumes, over 700 of which I wrote myself." In 1854 he published his second book, Walden, and it is on this book his fame is based. Mr. Lowell, in a passage of truly monumental misapprehension, has said "Thoreau had no humour, and this implies that he was a sorry logician." It is not easy to see what Lowell meant by this implication, or what is the connection between humour and logic; but it is certain that no statement

could be more manifestly false. Thoreau is a singularly acute logician, and his power of humour is sufficiently proved by the selection in this volume. He is not humourous in Lamb's way, it is true; his more frequent mood is dry irony; but when he apologises for not doing good by saying that he has tried it fairly, and is satisfied that it does not agree with his constitution, he achieves a kind of quaintness in which Lamb would have delighted. Thoreau, like all familiar essayists, writes of himself. He is not lovable, not genial, but he is so original in his attitude to life and society that he never fails to excite our interest. And it must also be added that no modern writer has ever loved Nature with a more real passion, or has written of natural objects with surer accuracy.

Of the two remaining writers quoted in this volume little need be said. Stevenson has passed away so recently, and his work is so well known, that the general characteristics of his work are familiar to all cultured readers. As an essayist he had many modes, and was successful in each. He has written the sermonic essay, although he writes rather as a friendly adviser than a preacher; he has written excellent critical and biographical essays, as for example the essay on Burns; but his chief merit is that he imparts to all he writes the intimate and familiar note. He is the familiar of all things. The roadside beggar, children at play, the priest, the mule-driver, the tavern companion of a night, interest him as deeply as Burns or Villon. In this broad humanitarianism and worldwideness he resembles Goldsmith. As a stylist he is supreme. He loves words for their own sake, perceives their colour and value with the exigent eye of the artist, and yet always uses them as a means to accurate and sometimes subtle thought. It may be said finally of Stevenson's familiar essays that, more than any other modern, he has brought the essay

back to Montaigne; with him also "My subject is myselfe."

One other essayist, Richard Dowling, is included in this series, because he affords an admirable example of the perfection to which the essay has come among modern writers who are comparatively unknown. Dowling lived and died unappreciated by his contemporaries. The literary journals which recorded his death could find nothing to comment on but his personal qualities; upon his work they were silent, or scornfully condescending. Yet Dowling wrote at least one essay which is worthy to rank with the best in English Literature-viz., the essay which is included in this volume. The fact that such a piece of work is totally unknown illustrates something more than the blindness of contemporary criticism; it is significant of the amount of excellent essay-work which was before the world that this should be unnoticed. And in this reflection we reach the last word upon the English essay. What has been said in a previous volume of this series on the art of letter-writing is equally true of the essay; it is one of the forms of literature that is marked by a steady progression toward a more generally diffused excellence. In the great literary journals, and often in the popular press, there appear to-day many essays of which neither Defoe nor Addison, Goldsmith nor Johnson, had they lived to-day, would have had cause to be ashamed. But while the model has been surpassed, the value of the model can never be ignored; all can grow the flower, but only a few can supply the seed; and the chief object of this work is to furnish a compact account of the evolution of the essay from seed to flower, from its first diffident attempt at separate expression to its final triumph as a recognised form of literary art.

A CITY NIGHT-PIECE

Oliver Goldsmith

The clock has just struck two, the expiring taper rises and sinks in the socket, the watchman forgets the hour in slumber, the laborious and the happy are at rest, and nothing wakes but meditation, guilt, revelry, and despair. The drunkard once more fills the destroying bowl, the robber walks his midnight round, and the suicide lifts his guilty arm against his own sacred person.

Let me no longer waste the night over the page of antiquity or the sallies of contemporary genius, but pursue the solitary walk, where Vanity, ever changing, but a few hours past walked before me, where she kept up the pageant, and now, like a froward child, seems hushed with her own importunities.

What a gloom hangs all around! The dying lamp feebly emits a yellow gleam; no sound is heard but of the chiming clock, or the distant watch-dog. All the bustle of human pride is forgotten; an hour like this may well display the emptiness of human vanity.

There will come a time when this temporary solitude may be made continual, and the city itself, like its inhabitants, fade away, and leave a desert in its room.

What cities, as great as this, have once triumphed in existence! had their victories as great, joy as just and as unbounded, and, with short-sighted presumption, promised themselves immortality! Posterity can hardly trace the situation of some; the sorrowful traveller wanders over the awful ruins of others; and, as he beholds, he learns wisdom, and feels the transience of every sublunary possession.

"Here," he cries, "stood their citadel, now grown over with weeds; there, their senate house, but now the haunt