XXI.—Charles Lamb, the Greatest of the Essayists

Extract

It has been the custom of historians of literature to discuss essays as if there were no essential difference between, say the Essays of Bacon and those of Macaulay, or between the Spectator and the Essays in Criticism. In his recent book, The English Essay and Essayists, a work which, however comprehensive, leaves much to be desired on the score of adequacy of treatment, Professor Walker makes a distinction between “essays par excellence” and compositions on scientific, philosophical, historical, or critical subjects, which agree with the former, “only in being comparatively short and in being more or less incomplete.” Lamb's essays he considers the best example of the “literary form;” yet when he comes to discuss the Essays of Elia he does not attempt to show wherein these pieces differ from the compositions of Elia's contemporaries or successors. Every reader is vaguely conscious of a difference of kind between the essays of various writers; for example, between those of Macaulay, Stevenson, Carlyle, etc., and the pieces by Hazlitt or Charles Lamb; and it is part of the intention of the following paper to indicate the nature of this difference. Generally speaking, the secret lies in the fact that Lamb carried on the traditions of the English essay, the tradition that found its first conscious spokesman in Bacon, was afterwards perpetuated in the periodical essays of the eighteenth century, and found its fullest, if not its latest, expressions in the Essays of Elia.