LONDON TORONTO & PARIS: J.M. DENT & SONS LTD. NEW YORK E.P. DUTTON AND
CO.]

First Issue of this Edition 1913
Reprinted 1915, 1916

INTRODUCTION

This is a book of short essays which have been chosen with the full
liberty the form allows, but with the special idea of illustrating
life, manners and customs, and at intervals filling in the English
country background. The longer essays, especially those devoted to
criticism and to literature, are put aside for another volume, as
their different mode seems to require. But the development of the art
in all its congenial variety has been kept in mind from the beginning;
and any page in which the egoist has revealed a mood, or the gossip
struck on a vein of real experience, or the wise vagabond sketched a
bit of road or countryside, has been thought good enough, so long as
it helped to complete the round. And any writer has been admitted who
could add some more vivid touch or idiom to that personal half
meditative, half colloquial style which gives this kind of writing its
charm.

We have generally been content to date the beginning of the Essay in
English from Florio's translation of Montaigne. That work appeared
towards the end of Queen Elizabeth's time, in 1603, and no doubt it
had the effect of setting up the form as a recognized _genre_ in
prose. But as we go back behind Florio and Montaigne, and behind
Francis Bacon who has been called our "first essayist," we come upon
various experiments as we might call them--essays towards the essay,
attempts to work that vein, discursively pertinent and richly
reminiscent, out of which the essay was developed. Accordingly for a
beginning the line has been carried back to the earliest point where
any English prose occurs that is marked with the gossip's seal. A leaf
or two of Chaucer's prose, a garrulous piece of the craftsman's
delight in his work from Caxton, and one or two other detachable
fragments of the same kind, may help us to realize that there was a
predisposition to the essay, long before there was any conscious and
repeated use of the form itself. By continuing the record in this way
we have the advantage of being able to watch its relation to the whole
growth in the freer art of English prose. That is a connection indeed
in which all of us are interested, because however little we write,
whether for our friends only, or for the newspapers, we have to
attempt sooner or later somethin