The delightful form of poetry which we call by a French name, _vers de société,_ (although it has flourished more abundantly in English literature than in French) and which Mr. Austin Dobson, one of its supreme masters, prefers to call by Cowper's term, "familiar verse," may be accepted as the metrical equivalent of the prose essay as this was developed and expanded by the English writers of the eighteenth century. And as the familiar verse of our language is ampler and richer than that of any other tongue, so also is the familiar essay. Indeed, the essay is one of the most characteristic expressions of the quality of our race. In its ease and its lightness and its variety, it is almost unthinkable in German; and even in French it is far less frequent than in English and far less assiduously cultivated.
As Emerson trod in the footsteps of Bacon so Washington Irving walked in the trail blazed by Steele and Addison and Goldsmith; and Franklin earlier, although his essays are in fact only letters, had revealed his possession of the special quality the essay demands,--the playful wisdom of a man of the world who is also a man of letters. Indeed, Dr. Franklin was far better fitted to shine as an essayist than his more ponderous contemporary, Dr. Johnson; certainly Franklin would never have "made little fishes talk like whales." And in the nineteenth century the American branch of English literature has had a group of essayists less numerous than that which adorned the British branch, but not less interesting or less important to their own people.
Among these American essayists we may find all sorts and conditions of writers,--poets adventuring themselves in prose, novelists eschewing story-telling, statesmen turning for a moment to matters of less weight, men of science and men of affairs chatting about themselves and airing their opinions at large. In their hands, as in the hands of their British contemporaries, the essay remains infinitely various, refusing to conform to any single type, and insisting on being itself and on expressing its author. We find in the best of these American essayists the familiar style and the everyday vocabulary, the apparent simplicity and the seeming absence of effort, the horror of pedantry and the scorn of affectation, which are the abiding characteristics of the true essay. We find also the flavor of good talk, of the sprightly conversation that may sparkle in front of a wood fire and that often vanishes with the curling blue smoke.