g which is virtually an essay in
everyday English. There is no form of writing in which the fluid idiom
of the language can be seen to better effect in its changes and in its
movement. There is none in which the play of individuality, and the
personal way of looking at things, and the grace and whimsicality of
man or woman, can be so well fitted with an agreeable and responsive
instrument. When Sir Thomas Elyot in his "Castle of Health" deprecates
"cruel and yrous[1] schoolmasters by whom the wits of children be
dulled," and when Caxton tells us "that age creepeth on me daily and
feebleth all the body," and that is why he has hastened to ordain in
print the Recule of the Historeys of Troyes, and when Roger Ascham
describes the blowing of the wind and how it took the loose snow with
it and made it so slide upon the hard and crusted snow in the field
that he could see the whole nature of the wind in that act, we are
gradually made aware of a particular fashion, a talking mode (shall we
say?) of writing, as natural, almost as easy as speech itself; one
that was bound to settle itself at length, and take on a propitious
fashion of its own.

[Footnote 1: Irascible.]

But when we try to decide where it is exactly that the bounds of the
essay are to be drawn, we have to admit that so long as it obeys the
law of being explicit, casually illuminative of its theme, and germane
to the intellectual mood of its writer, then it may follow pretty much
its own devices. It may be brief as Lord Verulam sometimes made it, a
mere page or two; it may be long as Carlyle's stupendous essay on the
Niebelungenlied, which is almost a book in itself. It may be grave and
urbane in Sir William Temple's courtly style; it may be Elian as Elia,
or ripe and suave like the "Spectator" and the "Tatler." The one
clause that it cannot afford to neglect is that it be entertaining,
easy to read, pleasant to remember. It may preach, but it must never
be a sermon; it may moralize, but it must never be too forbidding; it
may be witty, high-spirited, effervescent as you like, but it must
never be flippant or betray a mean spirit or a too conscious clever
pen.

Montaigne, speaking through the mouth of Florio, touched upon a nice
point in the economy of the essay when he said that "what a man
directly knoweth, that will he dispose of without turning still to his
book or looking to his pattern. A mere bookish sufficiency is
unpleasant." The essayist, in fact, m