will allow the beggar to claim that relationship with him.  To have to die is a distinction of which no man is proud.  The speaking about one’s self is not necessarily offensive.  A modest, truthful man speaks better about himself than about anything else, and on that subject his speech is likely to be most profitable to his hearers.  Certainly, there is no subject with which he is better acquainted, and on which he has a better title to be heard.  And it is this egotism, this perpetual reference to self, in which the charm of the essayist resides.  If a man is worth knowing at all, he is worth knowing well.  The essayist gives you his thoughts, and lets you know, in addition, how he came by them.  He has nothing to conceal; he throws open his doors and windows, and lets him enter who will.  You like to walk round peculiar or important men as you like to walk round a building, to view it from different points, and in different lights.  Of the essayist, when his mood is communicative, you obtain a full picture.  You are made his contemporary and familiar friend.  You enter into his humours and his seriousness.  You are made heir of his whims, prejudices, and playfulness.  You walk through the whole nature of him, as you walk through the streets of Pompeii, looking into the interior of stately mansions, reading the satirical scribblings on the walls.  And the essayist’s habit of not only giving you his thoughts, but telling you how he came by them, is interesting, because it shows you by what alchemy the ruder world becomes transmuted into the finer.  We like to know the lineage of ideas, just as we like to know the lineage of great earls and swift race-horses.  We like to know that the discovery of the law of gravitation was born of the fall of an apple in an English garden on a summer afternoon.  Essays written after this fashion are racy of the soil in which they grow, as you taste the larva in the vines grown on the slopes of Etna, they say.  There is a healthy Gascon flavour in Montaigne’s Essays; and Charles Lamb’s are scented with the primroses of Covent Garden.

The essayist does not usually appear early in the literary history of a country:  he comes naturally after the poet and the chronicler.  His habit of mind is leisurely; he does not write from any special stress of passionate impulse; he does not create material so much as he comments upon material already existing.  It is essential for him that books should have been written, and that they should, at least to some extent, have been read and digested.  He is usually full of allusions and references, and these his reader must be able to follow and understand.  And in this literary walk, as in most others, the giants came first:  Montaigne and Lord Bacon were our earliest essayists, and, as yet, they are our best.  In point of style, these essays are different from anything that could now be produced.  Not only is the thinking different—­the manner of