If the courtly letter and the well-bred essay are not the characteristic literary form of our generation, we have some writers of satire and of literary and political opinions who deserve to be ranked among the essayists. Mr. F. P. Dunne would have been a pamphleteer in Swift’s time, a writer of the chatty essay in the days of Lamb and Hunt. Since he was born to bless our time, he finds a wider audience by putting his wit and wisdom, his Celtic blend of irony and humanity, into the mouth of “Mr. Dooley.” Another essayist of great power, though he is probably not called an “essayist” in the encyclopedias, is Mark Twain. He promises us an interminable Autobiography, some parts of which have been published. It is to be different from all other autobiographies, for the principle of its construction is that it is to have no order; he will talk about anything that happens to interest him, talk about it until he is tired of it and then talk about something else. This unprincipled willfulness of order and subject is the essayist’s special privilege. No man since Elia has succeeded better than Mark Twain in keeping up the interest of discursive monologue about things in general. Our public does not yet know how great a writer is this master of the American joke, and there are critics who will cry out that the mention of Mark Twain and Charles Lamb in the same breath is a violation of good sense. Yet Charles Lamb’s “Autobiography” is, except in its brevity, as like to the fragments of Mark Twain as the work of two men can be. “Below the middle stature,” says Elia of himself, “cast of face slightly Jewish, with no Judaic tinge in his complexional religion; stammers abominably, and is therefore more apt to discharge his occasional conversation in a quaint aphorism, or a poor quibble, than in set and edifying speeches; has consequently been libeled as a person always aiming at wit; which, as he told a dull fellow that charged him with it, is at least as good as aiming at dullness. A small eater, but not drinker; confesses a partiality for the production of the juniper berry; was a fierce smoker of tobacco, but may be resembled to a volcano burnt out, emitting only now and then an occasional puff.... He died ----, 18--, much lamented.” The footnote to the last sentence reads: “To anybody.--Please to fill up these blanks.” That is about as near to Mark Twain’s manner of fooling as anything in literature. All the genial essayists are given to jest and quibble and folly. And when you come upon a writer whose fantastic whimsies and nonsensical abandon are charming, be sure to turn the page, for you will invariably find wisdom and pathos and greatness of heart.