Excerpt from English Essays: With an Introduction In reading an essay you somehow feel as if you were the au thor's special audience, and were personally being made something of, in that the writer is addressing you individually. This is because the essay is personal, conversational, direct, pithy, impulsive, and unpretending. It resembles a letter. Does it not seem as if the writer had in mind some particular friend or intimate enemy to whom his pages are addressed, although dedicated to the public? To this definite or imaginary person the author speaks of fashion, manners, character, books, or politics, avoiding mere scholasticism, or pedantry, or the vitriolic force of the philippic. An essential quality of the essay is style. Whatever license of dulness or unevenness may be permitted to the writer of a long epic or history, the essayist must be alert, clear, concise, and polished. Obscureness is fatal, tediousness is suicidal. The manners of the camp, the acrimony of the forum, the technicality of the treatise, the ponderousness of the pulpit, are alike out of place. It is the courtly and debonair, the rapier thrust and not the bludgeon, the mobility and dash of the light cavalry and not the weight of the leviathan artillery, that one demands in the essay. In so far as one departs from these characteristics one leaves its true field. Of course everyone knows that all the essayists hark back to Montaigne. It is a long cry, and yet they have not improved upon him, nor are they likely so to do. Like Walt Whitman Montaigne celebrates himself, but so charmingly that interest in his works has never waned. The field of the English essay is very rich. Not to know the essayists is to have absolutely no adequate knowledge of English literature. They are of its very warp and woof. From Bacon down to the present day their names are among the brightest in the galaxy of English writers. If it be said that Bacon was too stately and severe, it may be remarked that this stateliness was part of his character. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.