first and supreme master of this manner of writing was Montaigne, who belongs in the front rank of the world’s greatest writers of prose.  Montaigne talks endlessly on the most trivial subjects without ever becoming trivial.  To those who really love reading and have some sympathy with humanity, Montaigne’s Essays are a “perpetual refuge and delight,” and it is interesting to reflect how far in literary fame this man, who talked about his meals, his horse, and his cat, outshines thousands of scholarly and talented writers, who discussed only the most serious themes in politics and religion.  The great English prose writers in the field of the personal essay during the seventeenth century were Sir Thomas Browne, Thomas Fuller, and Abraham Cowley, though Walton’s Compleat Angler is a kindred work.  Browne’s Religio Medici, and his delightful Garden of Cyrus, old Tom Fuller’s quaint Good Thoughts in Bad Times and Cowley’s charming Essays are admirable examples of this school of composition.  Burton’s wonderful Anatomy of Melancholy is a colossal personal essay.  Some of the papers of Steele and Addison in the Tatler, Guardian, and the Spectator are of course notable; but it was not until the appearance of Charles Lamb that the personal essay reached its climax in English literature.  Over the pages of the Essays of Elia hovers an immortal charm—­the charm of a nature inexhaustible in its humour and kindly sympathy for humanity.  Thackeray was another great master of the literary easy-chair, and is to some readers more attractive in this attitude than as a novelist.  In America we have had a few writers who have reached eminence in this form, beginning with Washington Irving, and including Donald G. Mitchell, whose Reveries of a Bachelor has been read by thousands of people for over fifty years.

As a personal essayist Stevenson seems already to belong to the first rank.  He is both eclectic and individual.  He brought to his pen the reminiscences of varied reading, and a wholly original touch of fantasy.  He was literally steeped in the gorgeous Gothic diction of the seventeenth century, but he realised that such a prose style as illumines the pages of William Drummond’s Cypress Grove and Browne’s Urn Burial was a lost art.  He attempted to imitate such writing only in his youthful exercises, for his own genius was forced to express itself in an original way.  All of his personal essays have that air of distinction which attracts and holds one’s attention as powerfully in a book as it does in social intercourse.  Everything that he has to say seems immediately worth saying, and worth hearing, for he was one of those rare men who had an interesting mind.  There are some literary artists who have style and nothing else, just as there are some great singers who have nothing but a voice.  The true test of a book, like that of an individual, is whether or not it improves upon acquaintance.  Stevenson’s essays reflect a personality that becomes brighter as we draw nearer.  This fact makes his essays not merely entertaining reading, but worthy of serious and prolonged study.