"This book attempts to put forward and interpret a tradition: the personal essay." Introduction, p. xxiii.

"These charming musings are not, strictly speaking, essays in the Western sense of the term, but fragments of ranging from a line to several pages—the primary matter of essays, so to speak." Chapter 1, p. 29.

"Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) may well have been the greatest essayist who ever lived." Chapter 2, p. 43.

"Most critics have viewed Dr. Johnson as a moral essayist rather than a personal essayist. Still, we see him cutting a personal figure in the essay of the fragility of friendship and procrastination seem to keenly observed not to have been drawn from his own experience." Chapter 4, p. 137.

"Addison and Stelle typically took a patronizing tone toward women, ridiculing their dependence on supposedly absurd new fashions and their alleged illogical and changeable natures. Edgeworth, seeming to agree at first...