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, must 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.