There is a kind of familiarity that breeds expectation rather
than contempt, and on this emotion the periodical essay floated through the eighteenth century. Defoe, Addison, Fielding and Goldsmith bequeathed their charm to Lamb. Hazlitt and Thackeray, and so the tale would seem to end. The modern reader of journalism knows better. If the mark of the periodical essay be moral sympathy he fords it in the late Sir W. Robertson Nicoll and the ever present Mr. Middleton Murry. If it be a friendly link of character, Mr. H. M. Tomlinson and " Wayfarer," late of the Nation, supply his need. If it be an intriguing blend of character and criticism, the " Autolycus " articles of Mr. Aldous Huxley, and the " Affable Hawk papers of Mr. Desmond McCarthy have not been written in vain. The Sunday papers give him the far from Addisonian leisure of Mr. Garvin and Mr. Ernest Newman, to balance the profaner Saturday interludes of Mr. F. W. Thomas. A new " Tatler," from the pens of Mr. Max Beerbohm, Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Tomlinson would not fail of success ; and a "Ladies' Magazine" from Mrs. Virginia Woolf, Miss Rebecca West, Miss Edith Sitwell and Mrs. Asquith would be inconceivable but startling. There is so much valuable essay-writing lost in the mael- strom of the Tress that we could wish the establishment of some periodical for waifs and strays. There is nothing to fix the age as the Tele,' and Spectator embalmed the days of Queen Anne. If" Wills," "The Grecian" and "White's Choco- late House " are no more, we can find-art and literature at the Café Royal, politics, at the Westminster "Lyons," tea-talk at the " Good Intent " or the " Blue Cockatoo," manners at " Murray's " and life at the coffee-stall. Fiction and the revue are in danger of usurping the mirror of manners, but there is room for all in. the wide domain of satire. Is it too much to suggest. that the fieedom of late years would have been curbed by a new urbanity of ridicule ? Punch is too much a time-server to be the chronicler of the age.' Let us have more malice. Such are the hopes and fears aroused by Dr. Marr's chatty account of the eighteenth-century essay- ists, whose work read in some hundred and fifty periodicals still leaves him with enthusiasm and discrimination. An index' of authors and topics would have increased the use- fulness of this otherwise excellent guide and survey.
(Continued on page 838.)
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