A Book of English Essays (1600-1900) (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from A Book of English Essays (1600-1900)

Of the word Essay it is necessary to say some thing, 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 Essaz's 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 some thing 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 dedica tion 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.

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