Boswell Cellini Chesterton Eckermann Evelyn Fields Franklin Lewes Lockhart Pellico Pepys Plato Pliny Plutarch Renan Southey Stephen Villari
Originally intended, as its name implies, to be a tentative effort rather than a finished production, the essay has none the less become one of the most perfect forms of prose. Its subject and the treatment thereof may be of almost any nature, provided it is well wrought and finished in style; for an essay is the artistic consideration of a topic, often critical, as in the case of Matthew Arnold's masterpieces, humorous, as with Lamb, philosophical as with Emerson, Carlyle, and Ruskin, and so on through a dozen diverse manners. In general the essay is brief, critical, and scholarly, and bears the stamp of the author's personality and individual opinion in his most polished style.
Bacon and Montaigne were the first to use it, Milton followed, and then Addison and Steele brought it to a high state of light and pungent perfection. Lamb, Macaulay, and Stevenson are perhaps the leaders in its later development. The work of such writers as Walton and Gilbert White, though not perhaps within the stricter limits of the definition, is closely related to the essay in tone and style.
Addison Arnold, M. Benson De Quincey Hamerton Harrison Hazlitt Howells Lamb Lang La Ramée Lowell Macaulay Mill Mitchell Montaigne Morley Pater Ruskin Sainte-Beuve Sidney Steele Stephen Stevenson Thackeray Thoreau Walton Warner White, G.
Humor is the most subtle of intellectual modes of expression. To define it and lay down its laws and principles is all but beyond human power. For it ranges from the inspired nonsense of Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass" or the rough and ready gusto of Browne's "Showman's Courtship" to the airily intangible delicacy of Lamb's "Essays of Elia" and the venomous sarcasm of Swift's "Gulliver's Travels." Mere wit turns on an absurd similarity in words or ideas, as in Hood's lines:
"They went and told the sexton, and The sexton tolled the bell."
Yet the deepest humor is all but pathos; Don Quixote's demented visions of giants that prove to be windmills and of castles that turn out to be taverns provoke our laughter while they stir our pity.