E-text prepared by David Clarke, Chandra Friend, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) Transcriber's note: A very small number of printer's errors have been corrected by reference to other editions. Footnotes have been moved from the bottom of the original page to just below the referring paragraph, or in a few cases, to just after the referring sentence. Author attribution lines have been regularized so that all appear one line below the essay to which they apply. See also the detailed transcriber's note at the end of the work. Everyman's Library Edited by Ernest Rhys ESSAYS A Century of English Essays Chosen by Ernest Rhys and Lloyd Vaughan * * * * * This is No. 653 of _Everyman's Library_. The publishers will be pleased to send freely to all applicants a list of the published and projected volumes arranged under the following sections: TRAVEL * SCIENCE * FICTION THEOLOGY & PHILOSOPHY HISTORY * CLASSICAL FOR YOUNG PEOPLE ESSAYS * ORATORY POETRY & DRAMA BIOGRAPHY REFERENCE ROMANCE In four styles of binding: cloth, flat back, coloured top; leather, round corners, gilt top; library binding in cloth, & quarter pigskin. LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONS, Ltd. NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO. * * * * * [Illustration: Most current ... For that they come home to men's business & bosoms.--Lord Bacon] [Illustration: A CENTURY of ENGLISH ESSAYS: an ANTHOLOGY RANGING FROM CAXTON TO R. L. STEVENSON & THE WRITERS OF OUR OWN TIME. 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.