The eighteenth century saw the absorption of the periodical essayists into avowed story-telling. Miss Burney left them nothing to do but to write sketches for chapters that might have appeared in her books. The essayists who came later could only make beautiful examples of a form that was already a little old-fashioned, though, following other suggestions, they experimented in a new direction and found another art to teach to story-tellers. Leigh Hunt's pair of early nineteenth-century portraits, 'The Old Gentleman,' and 'The Old Lady,' betray the family likeness of the character as it was known to Overbury. Lamb's portrait of Mrs. Battle is nearer modern story-telling. He does not let us into more than one of Sarah Battle's secrets, but in telling us of her attitude towards the game of whist he shows us how she looked upon the game of life. We would know her if we met her, even if she were not seated at the card-table, the candles unsnuffed, the fire merry on the hearth, and in the faces of her and her partner and foes the frosty joy of 'the rigour of the game.' Hazlitt, though he stuck close to his Montaigne, and cared less to illustrate himself by other people than by his own opinions, gives us characters too--that noble one of his father!--and his account of Jack Cavanagh the fives player, and his description of his going down to see the fight, are splendid passages of biography and narrative. But the gift of the later essayists to story-telling was the new art of reverie, and of the description of an event so soaked in the describer's personality as to be at once an essay and a story. [The art of reverie.] Few forms are richer in opportunity either for essayist or story-teller, than that which made possible Lamb's 'Dream Children,' and in which the child De Quincey, who had been in Hell, could show us the calamity of three generations of beautiful children, and ask at last whether death or life were the more terrible, the more to be feared. It is sufficient to mention the names of Walter Pater and Mr. Cunninghame Graham to show that some of the finest work of modern times has been done in this kind of story-telling, and is being so done to-day. And this art, this most delicate art of suggested narrative, is it not also--to return, perhaps a little fancifully, to the tragic old knight's definition--is it not also 'a picture in various colours, all of them heightned by one shadowing'? Is it not also 'a quicke and soft touch of many strings, all shutting up in one musicall close'? TRANSITION: BUNYAN AND DEFOE TRANSITION: BUNYAN AND DEFOE [The old world of fairy tale.]