nds him
(like Lincoln) of a story which has nothing to do with it; and that
story reminds him of another, and so on, till the original thesis is
left flapping in the breeze somewhere at the vanishing-point in the
tortuous perspective and vainly signalling the essayist back. It was the
same, or nearly the same, with the English essayists quite down to the
beginning of the last century, when they began to cease being. The
writers in the _Spectator_, the _Guardian_, the _Tatler_, the _Rambler_,
and the rest, contrived to keep a loose allegiance to the stated topic,
because they treated it so very briefly, and were explicitly off to
something else in the next page or two with a fresh text. But if we come
to such delightful masters of the art as Lamb and Leigh Hunt and De
Quincey and Hazlitt, it will not be easy, opening at any chance point,
to make out what they are talking about. They are apparently talking
about everything else in the world but the business they started with.
But they are always talking delightfully, and that is the great matter
with any sort of talker.

When the reviewers began to supplant the essayists, they were even more
contemptuously indifferent to the obligations of constancy. Their text
was nominally some book, but almost as soon as they had named it they
shut it and went off on the subject of it, perhaps, or perhaps not. It
was for the most part lucky for the author that they did so, for their
main affair with the author was to cuff him soundly for his ignorance
and impudence, and then leave him and not return to him except for a few
supplementary cuffs at the close, just to show that they had not
forgotten him. Macaulay was a notorious offender in this sort; though
why do we say offender? Was not he always delightful? He was and he is,
though we no longer think him a fine critic; and he meant to be just, or
as just as any one could be with a man whom one differed from in the
early Victorian period.

But Macaulay certainly did not keep harking back to his text, if ever he
returned to it at all. His instinct was that a preacher's concern was
with his text, but not an essayist's or a reviewer's, and he was right
enough. The essayist certainly has no such obligation or necessity. His
reader can leave him at any moment, unless he is very interesting, and
it does not matter where they part company. In fact, it might be argued
that the modern fidelity to its subject is one of the chief evidences or
c