ESSAYS AS HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS
In fact, one of the most interesting studies made available through The Harvard Classics is the survey of various national moods in successive historical periods. Take, for instance, the English essayists of the eighteenth century. Here are characteristic utterances of men so differently yet richly endowed as Addison and Swift, Steele and Defoe,〖H. C., xxvii, 91ff., 83ff., 133ff.〗 Sidney and Samuel Johnson, Hume〖H. C., xxvii, 203.〗 and Burke,〖H. C., xxiv, II.〗 yet the student of the eighteenth century, whether he is reading Hume or Burke on Taste, or Johnson explaining the plan of his great Dictionary,〖H. C., xxxix, 182ff.〗 Defoe’s ironical scheme for ridding the world of Dissenters, or Addison’s delicately sentimental musings in Westminster Abbey, detects, beneath all the differences in style and varieties of personal opinion, the unmistakable traits of race, nation, and period. These essays are thus historical documents of high importance. One understands better, for reading them, the England of Marlborough and of Walpole, the England of the Pitts and the four Georges. Any one century, as Carlyle said long ago, is the lineal descendant of all the preceding centuries, and an intelligent reading of the English essays of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries is one of the best ways of learning that significant lesson.