nd every day journalism was playing a larger
part in the political education of Englishmen. It fitted it to express
the life of towns. With the general extension of prosperity and trade
the town was coming into greater prominence as an element of national
life; and London above all was drawing to it the wealth and culture
which had till now been diffused through the people at large. It was
natural that this tendency should be reflected in literature; from the
age of the Restoration indeed literature had been more and more becoming
an expression of the life of towns; and it was town-life which was now
giving to it its character and form. As cities ceased to be regarded
simply as centres of trade and money-getting, and became habitual homes
for the richer and more cultured; as men woke to the pleasure and
freedom of the new life which developed itself in the street and the
mall, of its quicker movement, its greater ease, its abundance of social
intercourse, its keener taste, its subtler and more delicate courtesy,
its flow of conversation, the stately and somewhat tedious prose-writer
of days gone by passed into the briefer and nimbler essayist.

[Sidenote: The Essayists.]

What ruled writer and reader alike was the new-found pleasure of talk.
The use of coffee had only come in at the close of the civil wars; but
already London and the bigger towns were crowded with coffee-houses. The
popularity of the coffee-house sprang not from its coffee, but from the
new pleasure which men found in their chat over the coffee-cup. And from
the coffee-house sprang the Essay. The talk of Addison and Steele is the
brightest and easiest talk that was ever put in print: but its literary
charm lies in this, that it is strictly talk. The essayist is a
gentleman who chats to a world of gentlemen, and whose chat is shaped
and coloured by a sense of what he owes to his company. He must interest
and entertain, he may not bore them; and so his form must be short;
essay or sketch, or tale or letter. So too his style must be simple, the
sentences clear and quotable, good sense ready packed for carriage.
Strength of phrase, intricacy of structure, height of tone were all
necessarily banished from such prose as we banish them from ordinary
conversation. There was no room for pedantry, for the ostentatious
display of learning, for pompousness, for affectation. The essayist had
to think, as a talker should think, more of good taste than of
imaginative