The English Essay and Essayists

Professor Hugh Walker's The English Essay and Essayists is the pioneer attempt to present a complete survey of a literary type that has been most widely cultivated in England during the last three centuries. Within the twelve chapters ranging from "Anticipations of the Essay" to "Some Essayists of Yesterday," Professor Walker considers the writings of all British essayists' not now living whom he deems of any consequence. As was to be expected in a first edition of such a survey, a number of writers have been omitted who unquestionably should have received consideration.1 The inclusion, however, of a very considerable number of writings that cannot be classed as essays, if the term essay is to have any proper signification, indicates an inability to hold to some reasonably consistent definition of the genre. A rigid definition _ may be impracticable; but the writer who selects for study the essay as a type must, in his treatment at least, distinguish it amid all the varieties of miscellaneous prose. This Professor Walker has not done with any degree of consistency: apparently he feels free to treat as an essay any prose composition that interests him, provided that it is not a 'full and closely' articulated treatise, whether or not custom has assigned to it the name of essay.