E-text prepared by David Clarke, Chandra Friend, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team ()
Transcriber's note:
A very small number of printer's errors have been corrected by reference to other editions.
Footnotes have been moved from the bottom of the original page to just below the referring paragraph, or in a few cases, to just after the referring sentence.
Author attribution lines have been regularized so that all appear one line below the essay to which they apply.
See also the detailed transcriber's note at the end of the work.
Everyman's Library
Edited by Ernest Rhys
A Century of English Essays Chosen by Ernest Rhys and Lloyd Vaughan
* * * * *
This is No. 653 of Everyman's Library. The publishers will bepleased to send freely to all applicants a list of the published andprojected volumes arranged under the following sections:
THEOLOGY & PHILOSOPHY
POETRY & DRAMA
In four styles of binding: cloth, flat back, coloured top; leather,round corners, gilt top; library binding in cloth, & quarter pigskin.
LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONS, Ltd.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
* * * * *
[Illustration: Most current … For that they come home to men'sbusiness & bosoms.—Lord Bacon]
[Illustration: A CENTURY of ENGLISH ESSAYS: an ANTHOLOGY RANGING FROM
CAXTON TO R. L. STEVENSON & THE WRITERS OF OUR OWN TIME.
LONDON TORONTO & PARIS: J.M. DENT & SONS LTD. NEW YORK E.P. DUTTON AND
CO.]
First Issue of this Edition 1913
Reprinted 1915, 1916
This is a book of short essays which have been chosen with the fullliberty the form allows, but with the special idea of illustratinglife, manners and customs, and at intervals filling in the Englishcountry background. The longer essays, especially those devoted tocriticism and to literature, are put aside for another volume, astheir different mode seems to require. But the development of the artin all its congenial variety has been kept in mind from the beginning;and any page in which the egoist has revealed a mood, or the gossipstruck on a vein of real experience, or the wise vagabond sketched abit of road or countryside, has been thought good enough, so long asit helped to complete the round. And any writer has been admitted whocould add some more vivid touch or idiom to that personal halfmeditative, half colloquial style which gives this kind of writing itscharm.
We have generally been content to date the beginning of the Essay inEnglish from Florio's translation of Montaigne. That work appearedtowards the end o