heir of his whims, prejudices, and playfulness. You walk through the
whole nature of him, as you walk through the streets of Pompeii,
looking into the interior of stately mansions, reading the satirical
scribblings on the walls. And the essayist's habit of not only giving
you his thoughts, but telling you how he came by them, is interesting,
because it shows you by what alchemy the ruder world becomes transmuted
into the finer. We like to know the lineage of ideas, just as we like
to know the lineage of great earls and swift race-horses. We like to
know that the discovery of the law of gravitation was born of the fall
of an apple in an English garden on a summer afternoon. Essays written
after this fashion are racy of the soil in which they grow, as you
taste the larva in the vines grown on the slopes of Etna, they say.
There is a healthy Gascon flavour in Montaigne's Essays; and Charles
Lamb's are scented with the primroses of Covent Garden.

The essayist does not usually appear early in the literary history of a
country: he comes naturally after the poet and the chronicler. His
habit of mind is leisurely; he does not write from any special stress
of passionate impulse; he does not create material so much as he
comments upon material already existing. It is essential for him that
books should have been written, and that they should, at least to some
extent, have been read and digested. He is usually full of allusions
and references, and these his reader must be able to follow and
understand. And in this literary walk, as in most others, the giants
came first: Montaigne and Lord Bacon were our earliest essayists, and,
as yet, they are our best. In point of style, these essays are
different from anything that could now be produced. Not only is the
thinking different--the manner of setting forth the thinking is
different also. We despair of reaching the thought, we despair equally
of reaching the language. We can no more bring back their turns of