ust not be over literary, and
yet, if he have the habit, like Montaigne or Charles Lamb, of
delighting in old authors and in their favourite expressions and great
phrases, so that that habit has become part of his life, then his
essays will gain in richness by an inspired pedantry. Indeed the essay
as it has gone on has not lost by being a little self-conscious of its
function and its right to insist on a fine prose usage and a choice
economy of word and phrase.

The most perfect balance of the art on its familiar side as here
represented, and after my Lord Verulam, is to be found, I suppose, in
the creation of "Sir Roger de Coverley." Goldsmith's "Man in Black"
runs him very close in that saunterer's gallery, and Elia's people are
more real to us than our own acquaintances in flesh and blood. It is
worth note, perhaps, how often the essayists had either been among
poets like Hazlitt, or written poetry like Goldsmith, or had the
advantage of both recognizing the faculty in others and using it
themselves, like Charles Lamb; and if we were to take the lyrical
temperament, as Ferdinand Brunetiere did in accounting for certain
French writers, and relate it to some personal asseveration of the
emotion of life, we might end by claiming the essayists as dilute
lyrists, engaged in pursuing a rhythm too subtle for verse and
lifelike as common-room gossip.

And just as we may say there is a lyric tongue, which the true poets
of that kind have contributed to form, so there is an essayist's style
or way with words--something between talking and writing. You realize
it when you hear Dame Prudence, who is the Mother of the English
essay, discourse on Riches; Hamlet, a born essayist, speak on acting;
T.T., a forgotten essayist of 1614, with an equal turn for homily,
write on "Painting the Face"; or the "Tatler" make good English out of
the first thing that comes to hand. It is partly a question of art,
partly of temperament; and indeed paraphrasing Steele we may say that
the success of an essay depends upon the make of the body and the
formation of the mind, of him who writes it. It needs a certain way of
turning the pen, and a certain intellectual gesture, which cannot be
acquired, and cannot really be imitated.

It remains to acknowledge the friendly aid of those living essayists
who are still maintaining the standards and have contributed to the
book. This contemporary roll includes the Right Hon. Augustine
Birrell, Mr. Hilaire