the scattered effect of short essays on a hundred various subjects,
and give a connected, book-like character to the specimens.

Steele, for one, had certainly succeeded in putting himself, and his
way of taking the world--for this pioneer of an everybody's
literature had his subjectivities--into books. What a survival of
one long-past day, for instance, in "A Ramble from Richmond to
London"! What truth to the surface of common things, to their direct
claim on our interest! yet with what originality of effect in that
truthfulness, when he writes, for instance:

"I went to my lodgings, led by a light, whom I put into the discourse
of his private economy, and made him give me an account of the
charge, hazard, profit, and loss of a family that depended upon a
link."

[11] It was one of his peculiarities, he tells us, to live by the eye
far more than by any other sense (a peculiarity, perhaps, in an
Englishman), and this is what he sees at the early daily service then
common in some City churches. Among those who were come only to see
or be seen, "there were indeed a few in whose looks there appeared a
heavenly joy and gladness upon the entrance of a new day, as if they
had gone to sleep with expectation of it."

The industrious reader, indeed, might select out of these specimens
from Steele, a picture, in minute detail, of the characteristic
manners of that time. Still, beside, or only a little way beneath,
such a picture of passing fashion, what Steele and his fellows really
deal with is the least transitory aspects of life, though still
merely aspects--those points in which all human nature, great or