These he increased to 38
in 1612 and to 58 in 1625. In their first form, the essays of Bacon had
nothing of the fulness or grace of Montaigne's; they are meagre notes,
scarcely more than the headings for discourses. It is possible that when
he wrote them he was not yet familiar with the style of his predecessor,
which was first made popular in England, in 1603, when Florio published
that translation of the _Essais_ which Shakespeare unquestionably read.
In the later editions Bacon greatly expanded his theme, but he never
reached, or but seldom, the freedom and ease, the seeming formlessness
held in by an invisible chain, which are the glory of Montaigne, and
distinguish the typical essayist. It would seem that at first, in
England, as in France, no lesser writer was willing to adopt a title
which belonged to so great a presence as that of Bacon or Montaigne. The
one exception was Sir William Cornwallis (d. 1631), who published essays
in 1600 and 1617, of slight merit, but popular in their day. No other
English essayist of any importance appeared until the Restoration, when
Abraham Cowley wrote eleven "Several Discourses by way of Essays," which
did not see the light until 1668. He interspersed with his prose,
translations and original pieces in verse, but in other respects Cowley
keeps much nearer than Bacon to the form of Montaigne. Cowley's essay
"Of Myself" is a model of what these little compositions should be. The
name of Bacon inspires awe, but it is really not he, but Cowley, who is
the father of the English essay; and it is remarkable that he has had no
warmer panegyrists than his great successors, Charles Lamb and Macaulay.
Towards the end of the century, Sir George Mackenzie (1636-1691) wrote
witty moral discourses, which were, however, essays rather in name than
form. Whenever, however, we reach the eighteenth century, we find the
essay suddenly became a dominant force in English literature. It made
its appearance almost as a new thing, and in combination with the
earliest developments of journalism. On the 12th of April 1709 appeared
the first number of a penny newspaper, entitled the _Tatler_, a main
feature of which was to amuse and instruct fashionable readers by a
series of short papers dealing with the manifold occurrences of life,
_quicquid agunt homines_. But it was not until Steele, the founder of
the _Tatler_, was joined by Addison that the eighteenth-century essay
really started upon its course. It displayed at first, and indeed it
long retained, a mixture of the manner of Montaigne with that of La
Bruyere, combining the form of the pure essay with that of the
character-study, as modelled on Theophrastus, which had been so popular
in England throughout the seventeenth century. Addison's early _Tatler_
portraits, in particular such as those of "Tom Folio" and "Ned Softly,"
are hardly essays. But Steele's "Recollections of Childhood" is, and
here we may observe the type on which Goldsmith, Lamb and R.L. Stevenson
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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