SOURCE: Mulvihill, James. “‘Essence’ and ‘Accident’ in Lamb's Elia Essays.” Clio 24, no. 1 (fall 1994): 37-54.

In the following essay, Mulvihill traces affinities between Lamb's essays and Enlightenment moral philosophy, illustrated by the “dialectic of essence and accident” in Elia and The Last Essays of Elia.

Essayists, according to William Hazlitt, are, “if not moral philosophers, moral historians, and that's better: or they are both, they found the one character upon the other; their premises precede their conclusions.”¹ In this lecture “On the Periodical Essayists,” in Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819), Hazlitt praises the essayist's art as “the best and most natural course of study. It is in morals and manners what the experimental is in natural philosophy” (6:91). The influence of eighteenth-century moral philosophy on the English Romantics has most recently been explored by Alan Bewell in Wordsworth and the Enlightenment. Bewell convincingly argues that William Wordsworth's entire corpus...