himself, in his rôle of landed proprietor, striding— shall he confess the vanity?—with larger paces over his allotment of three quarters of an acre.

The structural form of the essay expresses appropriately its intimately personal spirit. The theme is not developed systematically or logically. The title of itself, considered in relation to the substance of the essay, shows this: it promises some account of Elia's first play, but the actual subject-matter concerns not only the first, but the second, third, and later plays seen by the author. The second and third paragraphs digress from the main theme; and the course of the essay throughout resembles more the wayward flow of a familiar conversation than the studied development of a given theme.

The style of the essay is in harmony with the subject-matter and structural form. It is highly individual and characteristic. It possesses a strong savour of quaint humour, which makes itself felt partly through the use of uncommon but quaintly expressive conjunctions of words. Regarded generally, the style reflects qualities of the heart rather than of the intellect: it is stamped by a sympathetic humour and loving humanity, rather than by a sharp wit or penetrating intellect: hence some of the more purely intellectual features of style-such as antithesis, balance, and epigram-are not prominent in the essay.

It is a good plan to read the essays of several different writers consecutively, with a view to comparison and contrast. For instance, after an essay of Lamb's, one of Addison's might be studied. No. 335 of The Spectator, in which Addison describes Sir Roger de

Coverley's visit to the theatre, may be compared with Elia's essay on "My First Play." Here we have two essays dealing with similar subjects in similar styles. In one we read of the impressions of an unsophisticated old man-old in years, but young in heart and feeling, at the performance of a play; in the other we read of the impressions of an unsophisticated imaginative child. Both belong to the class of "familiar essays," but Addison's is differentiated from Lamb's in that, while it is not so intimately personal in tone, it has a superadded dramatic interest. No. 93 of The Spectator, again, may be contrasted with the essay on 'My First Play." Here we have two essays dealing with entirely different subjects in different styles. Addison's paper in The Spectator deals with an abstract theme, "On Proper Methods of Employing Time," and is an example of the didactic essay. Its style may be contrasted to excellent effect with that of "My First Play": while the latter is suffused with feeling, the former is marked rather by intellectual qualities. Each of Addison's paragraphs forms a unity within itself, and many of them are explicitly linked to the preceding paragraph: it may be added that this mode of junction, superimposed by the intellect for the sake of greater clearness and more exact sequence, is more mechanical in kind than the fusion of paragraph to paragraph in the natural flow of feeling and thought, moving independently of external aids. Addison's sentences are marked by unity and clearness, and their most conspicuous feature is the extensive use of antithesis, balance, and epigram. The first sentences of the essay are characteristic: 'We all of us complain

of the shortness of time, saith Seneca, and yet have much more than we know what to do with. Our lives, says he, are spent either in doing nothing at all, or in doing nothing to the purpose, or in doing nothing that we ought to do. We are always complaining our days are few, and acting as though there would be no end of them." The words in Addison's essay are well-chosen and appropriately used; they are mostly words in common use, and have not the recondite quality of the vocabulary in Lamb's essay1.

1 Teachers will find in the undernoted volume (now in the press) material adapted to the application of the comparative method and of the general method of study indicated in this chapter:-Prose Essays, arranged for Comparative Study, with Notes and Exercises, by W. Macpherson, M.A. (Blackie and Son).

CHAPTER V.

THE STUDY OF LYRIC POETRY.

IT may be claimed as one of the advantages appertaining to the study of lyric poetry that through it as medium the importance of the element of structure in literature may be taught more easily than through any other literary form. The first lesson a pupil has to learn regarding structure is that a work of literary art should be pervaded by a certain unity: underlying all its details there must be implicitly present a central unity of feeling or thought and a corresponding harmony of atmosphere. It is the merit of a lyric poem, in this connexion, as compared with other forms of literature, that in it the reader may more easily perceive the central unity of its theme. This advantage lyric poetry possesses, in the first place, because it is, compared with other literary forms, brief in its expression, and is less overlaid with details; and secondly, because from its essential nature it aims at impressing on the reader's consciousness some single vivid idea or emotion-thus we find Mr Palgrave remarking in his preface to The Golden Treasury (First

Series) that "lyrical' has been here held essentially to imply that each poem shall turn on some single thought, feeling, or situation." It is true, of course, that in every work of literary art, whatever be its kind, there must be amid a varying multiplicity of detail an underlying unity; and just in proportion as the perusal of the whole work produces this effect of unity is the work great as a product of art. Hence, in the higher stages of literature teaching, in all cases the structure of the literary works that are read will form an object of study. For example, it will be a valuable exercise for pupils who are reading a play of Shakespeare to trace the unity of plan, and the progressive development of that unity, throughout the play. Such an exercise, however, in the case of a drama will be a task of much greater difficulty and complexity than is involved in examining the structure of a lyric poem. A remark made by Mr Pater in his essay on "Shakespere's English Kings1" illustrates this point admirably. Lyric poetry, he says, “in spite of complex structure, often preserves the unity of a single passionate ejaculation"; whereas, in dramatic poetry, "especially to the reader, as distinguished from the spectator assisting at a theatrical performance, there must always be a sense of the effort necessary to keep the various parts from flying asunder, a sense of imperfect continuity." Mr Pater is here speaking of the difficulty which the adult reader finds in preserving the sense of unity amid the multiplicity of detail of a drama; and for the schoolboy the difficulty is much greater. The same difficulty, though in a lesser degree,

1 Appreciations: with an Essay on Style. Macmillan.