To say that every kind of writing seems to be essay which is not something else is, like some other Hibernian statements, a short way of expressing the truth. To be an artistic essay, to be really worthy the name, a composition must have in it a living personality. Personality is the soul of the essay. We do not admit under the term, essay, broad as it is, the discourse which has only utility to recommend it. An article on “How Our Presidents are Elected” may be instructive, it may be more necessary to the education of the young citizen than Leigh Hunt’s chat about stage-coaches. But Hunt’s chat is an essay: the other is not. A present-day indication of the difference between the essay and the unliterary form of exposition is the habit of our magazines of classifying all prose pieces that tell us “how” and “what” as “special articles,” whereas “essays”--the editors do not print essays if they can help it! If a modern writer has an idea that would make an essay he is tempted to disguise it under some more acceptable shape. But the editors would retort--and with justice--that they would gladly print essays if they could get good ones. There is something frank and immediate in the appeal of an essay; the writer of it must be able to talk continuously well; he has no surprises of plot to fall back on to wake the interest of an inattentive auditor; he stands before us on a bare platform with no stage lights or scenery to help him. When he succeeds, his reward is a kind of personal victory, he finds not only readers but friends. This is especially true of those essayists who discourse of “things in general,” the true essayists, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Montaigne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oliver Goldsmith. The true essayist, like the Walrus in “Alice in Wonderland,” advises us that the time has come To talk of many things: Of shoes--and ships--and sealing wax-- Of cabbages--and kings-- And why the sea is burning hot-- And whether pigs have wings. And he proceeds, subject to no obligation in the world except the great obligation never to be dull. The obligation upon the essayist not to be dull imposes a peculiar obligation upon the reader that he shall be keen-witted. A stupid person may be stirred to attention by a novel or a play, but no stupid person can enjoy an essay. Indeed a taste for essays is a pretty sure sign of a reader who appreciates the literary spirit in itself.