It may be noted also that although American literature has not been adorned by so great a galaxy of brilliant names as illumined British literature in the nineteenth century, it has had the good fortune to possess more authors of cosmopolitan fame than can be found in the German literature of the past hundred years, in the Italian, or in the Spanish. A forgotten American essayist once asserted that "foreign nations are a contemporaneous posterity," and even if this smart saying is not to be taken too literally, it has its significance. There is therefore food for thought in the fact that at least half a dozen, not to say half a score, of American authors have won wide popularity outside the limits of their own language,--a statement which could not be made of as many German or Italian or Spanish authors of the nineteenth century. From the death of Goethe to the arrival of the playwrights of the present generation, perhaps Heine is the sole German writer either of prose or of verse who has established his reputation broadly among the readers of other tongues than his own. And not more than one or two Spanish or Italian authors have been received even by their fellow Latins, as warmly as the French and the Germans have welcomed Cooper and Poe, Emerson and Mark Twain. It is to present typical and characteristic examples of the American contribution to English literature in the essay-form that this volume has been prepared. Perhaps the term "essay-form" is not happily chosen since the charm of the essay lies in the fact that it is not formal, that it may be whimsical in its point of departure, and capricious in its ramblings after it has got itself under way. Even the Essay is itself a chameleon, changing color while we study it. There is little in common between Locke's austere _Essay on the Human Understanding_ and Lamb's fantastic and frolicsome essay on _Roast Pig_. He would be bold indeed who should take compass and chain to measure off the precise territory of the Essay and to mark with scientific exactness the boundaries which separate it from the Address on the one side and from the Letter on the other. "Some (there are) that turn over all books and are equally searching in all papers," said Ben Jonson; "that write out of what they presently find or meet, without choice.... Such are all the Essayists, ever their master Montaigne." Bacon and Emerson followed in the footsteps of Montaigne, and present us with the results of their browsings among books and of their own dispersed meditations. In their hands the essay lacks cohesion and unity; it is essentially discursive. Montaigne never stuck to his text, when he had one; and the paragraphs of any of Emerson's essays might be shuffled without increasing their fortuitous discontinuity.