Desert islands and shipwrecked crews are apparently very old themes in French prose fiction. There is a desert island episode in Les Amours de Clidamant et de Marilinde, a sentimental novel of 1603. The shipwreck of a Portuguese merchantman is the prelude to L'Isle des hermaphrodites, a satirical work of 1605. Accounts of such adventures in the “true voyage” literature of the first half of the 17th century in France are numerous. To cite only some works which went through several editions in this period, the Voyages of Jean Mocquet contains the story of a lone European on an unknown shore. Repeated editions in French translation of Garcilaso's Historia de los Incas contain the better known Serrano desert island story, while two editions of the Voyages du sieur Vincent Le Blanc furnish other material of like nature.

Writers almost always, either consciously or unconsciously, make of their books mirrors of their personalities, eagerly exposing every trait to the public. But occasionally a writer wears a mask before this literary mirror and the public sees him only in disguise save perhaps in the pages of his intimate correspondence. Such a man was Hippolyte Taine, and it is a curious task to study this reserved scholar as he reveals himself in his books, to watch for the rare lines where he has dropped his mask in unguarded moments of secret ambition, of ennui or despair, of sudden mockery or mirth.

Of all the literary terms in common use, the word “essay” has perhaps the widest field and the most indeterminate content. Since the form to which it applies has taken on a fresh character in the hands of almost all its chief exponents, it has become in practice the designation for any piece of prose of moderate length, and has consequently embraced a bewilderingly various subject-matter. Moreover, the essayists themselves are by no means all of a piece. Bacon and Lamb, for instance, have little in common; and the type of ‘essayist’ represented by Macaulay and Carlyle has little in common with either. As a result of this wide extension, studies of the essay either include so much as to be very indefinite, or else are based on partial views, the upshot, in either case, becoming sufficiently vague. At the same time, the word “essay” goes on being used, and collections, of curiously assorted content, go on being made; and it therefore seems worth while to pass in review the different types represented in actual practice, in order to see just how much continuity is discernible among them.

Traces of the aube in English and Scottish literature are to be found in a few titles and a few fragments or adaptations of the type. But the aube, which deals with the parting of lovers at dawn, seems to me to represent only one group in a large body of songs that picture the various phases of a lover's secret visit to his lady at night. No such number of these related songs, either medieval or modern, is to be found in England as on the Continent, but enough material survives in one form or another to suggest their main conventions.

Walter Savage Landor's professions, found everywhere in his letters, that he is writing for the few, and his rather studied contempt of the aura popularis are best illustrated by his epic poem, Gebir, first published in 1798. For this extraordinary poem the guests are, indeed, few and select. Southey's admiration for the epic was unbounded; Lamb refers to its creator as “Gebir Landor” ; and Shelley read and re-read the poem. Yet so unknown was Gebir to the general reader that De Quincey remarked that Gebir had “the sublime distinction, for some time, of having enjoyed only two readers, Southey and myself.” And Miss Seward wrote Todd, the editor of Spenser and Milton, that Gebir was “the most unintelligible fustian that ever bore the name of an epic poem.”

“Tess of the D'Urbervilles” was greeted with a storm of criticism, which did not abate on the appearance, four years later, of “Jude the Obscure.” Mr. Hardy seems rightly to have anticipated, in the preface to “Tess,” the feelings of the “too genteel reader who cannot endure to have said what everybody nowadays thinks and feels.” And it is true that he does exhibit in these novels a frankness of tone on all that pertains to sex somewhat unusual in England in the early nineties. But Hardy was by no means the kind of writer to disregard the predilections of his public on this or any other point of taste. There are but too many evidences of his willingness to meet them half way. And there is nothing which shows more strikingly his respect for the public taste, especially in the earlier stories, than his great delicacy, according to present standards—not to say his conventionality—in regard to matters of sex.

The hardest thing to do with a child, sometimes, is to name it. The same is often true of a type of literature. To find a name which shall adequately express the tendencies and purposes of certain literary work is a difficult and perplexing task. It often happens, too, that a name is given carelessly, because of some application either incidental or actually mistaken, and remains fixed, although its appropriateness is only superficial.