So we take peculiar delight in that kind of literature which is avowedly a talk, a monologue in which an author discourses, not through poetic forms, or through fiction in which other characters are the speakers, but directly to us as in a private letter or a spoken lecture. This kind of discourse is called an essay. The man who talks may pretend to be something that he is not, and the essayist is often a writer of fiction portraying only one character. Such was Lamb when he pretended to be Elia; such was Swift in many of his pamphlets; such was the “_Spectator_,” a multiple personality whose wig Addison and Steele and their friends could put on at will. Whether it is a real or a fictitious person who addresses us through the essay, the form of the essay is the same, a direct communication from a “me” to a “you.” The essay may have for its subject anything under the sun. It may be a short biography with critical comment, as in Macaulay’s essays on Addison, on Chatham, on Clive, and Carlyle’s essays on Burns and Scott. Other essays by Macaulay and Carlyle are on a framework of historical narrative. Oliver Wendell Holmes invented an essay form all his own in “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,” in which the opinions of the autocrat are linked together by a pleasant boarding-house romance. And he achieved an unusual triumph when he continued the form in other books, “The Poet at the Breakfast Table” and “The Professor at the Breakfast Table,” and did not suffer the disaster that usually befalls a writer’s effort to repeat a success. Most of the written philosophy of the modern world is in the form of essays. In Emerson we have philosophy in short eloquent discourses, many of them like sermons. Political arguments and orations, if they have literary quality, like those of Burke and Webster, properly come under the head of essay. And almost all of the important body of literature called criticism is in essay form.