INTRODUCTION.

HE Eighteenth-Century Essayists, even in the

THE

compact editions of Chalmers and Berguer, occupy some forty or fifty volumes. These, again, are only a part of those whose names are given in the laborious list compiled by Dr. Nathan Drake. compress any representative selection from such a

Το

mass of literature within the limits of the Parch

6

ment Library' is clearly out of the question; and it must therefore be distinctly explained that we are here concerned only with a particular division of the subject. That grave and portentous production— the essay critical,' 'metaphysical,' 'moral,' which so impressed our forefathers, has become to us a little lengthy a little wearisome.

fashioned; something is obsolete.

Much of it is old

With the march

of time philosophy has taken fresh directions; a new

apparatus criticus has displaced the old; and if we are didactic now, we are didactic with a difference.

But

the