eliance upon every-day life as the true and only source of surprise and
delight in art, they could never be in the terrible despair which had
afflicted him from time to time before his illumination.

Doubtless there is an overruling Providence in this matter which we may
not distrust without accusing the order which has not yet failed in the
due succession of the seasons and the days and nights. While we are
saying it is never going to rain, it rains; or when it seems as if
nature were finally frozen up, a thaw begins; when we feel that the dark
will not end, the dawn is already streaking the east. If the preacher
thinks that the old texts are no longer applicable to life, there is
suddenly reported an outbreak of vice in the city which puts him in mind
of Sodom and Gomorrah; or the opportune flight of a defaulter furnishes
material for a homily which searches the consciences of half the
congregation with the words of the commandment against stealing. The
journalist wakes in heavy-eyed despair, but he finds from the papers on
his breakfast-table that there has been a revolution in South America,
or that the Socialists have been doing something in Belgium almost too
bad even for Socialists as the capitalists imagine them, and his heart
rises again. Even the poor magazine essayist, who has lived through the
long month in dread of the hour when his copy shall be due, is not
forbidden his reprieve. He may not have anything to say, but he
certainly has something to say it about. The world is always as
interesting to-day as it was yesterday, and probably to-morrow will not
be so dull as it promises.

One reason for the disability of the essayist, as distinguished from the
preacher or the journalist, is that he does not give himself range
enough. Expecting to keep scrupulously to one subject, he cannot put his
hand on a theme which he is sure will hold out under him to the end.
Once it was not so. The essayists of antiquity were the most vagariously
garrulous people imaginable. There was not one of them who, to our small
acquaintance with them, kept to his proposition or ended anywhere in
sight of it. Aristotle, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Plutarch, they talk
of anything but the matter in hand, after mentioning it; and when you
come down to the moderns, for instance, to such a modern as Montaigne,
you find him wandering all over the place. He has no sooner stated his
subject than he begins to talk about something else; it remi