ABSTRACT
The essay, therefore, developed chiefly in relation to such types as the “character,” the dialogue, the prose epistle, the pamphlet, and the “newsmongering” periodical-the last of which in the century to follow engrossed the form. The essay traditions established earlier in the seventeenth century were sound yet lacking in singleness. Authors with a passion for definition followed in the wake of Bacon and Feltham. That explicit schoolmaster Ralph Johnson, in his Scholar’s Guide from the Accidence to the University (1665), described the essay as “a short discourse about any virtue, vice, or other commonplace.” And the sixth and last of his “rules for making it” is: “In larger and compleat Essays (such as Bacon’s, Feltham’s, &c.) we must labour compendiously to express the whole nature of, with all observables about our subject.” The Bacon-Feltham tradition (if it is a single tradition) with its emphasis on virtues, vices, and other truisms perpetuates itself best in the more limited “character,” and less eminently in such essays as derive from accumulations in the author’s commonplace-book. Outside its allied type, the
Discursiveness of the Essay
Essay Traditions
character, this Baconian essay tradition is less influential than the work of Montaigne.
