II. "OF ESSAY WRITING." Ir is not to be wondered at that Essays are popular. We all like gossip. The human bow cannot always be bent, or its string would soon crack. The most thinking and aspiring philosopher cannot be always in the cloudland of high thoughts and aspirations, but must come down sometimes to the dead level of common everyday humanity, and find himself swayed more or less by the currents of hopes and fears, of anxieties and passions, by which his fellow-men are swayed. When Johnson the logician, and Thompson the great art-critic meet each other on the shady side of Pall Mall, do you think they fall to immediately at a word-battle of dialectics, or are engrossed by a critical discussion of Millais's last new picture? Not a bit of it. The probability is that the topic which interests them, and on which they have so much to say to each other, is closely connected with Johnson's dinner-hour, or Thompson's mother-inlaw.

In fact we all like that common chat which grows out of our common life. And it is for this reason that Essaywriting, which is only a better sort of gossip, has been always a popular form of literature; bringing, as it does, literature home to men's businesses and bosoms.

And, considering what classes of society contribute the great mass of readers at the present day, the only wonder is that the writing of Essays does not form a more manifest current in that great flood of book-making which is sweeping the modern mind on to chaos and forgetfulness. I suppose that the greater number of readers-of people to whom books are a necessity-is to be found in country-houses, amongst those who are tolerably well educated, and yet are isolated and shut off from communion with many cultivated minds. To such people books are society, books are friends. It was not in London, but at Foston-in-the-Clay, in the wilds of Yorkshire, that Sydney Smith exclaimed so devoutly, "Thank God for books!" No. 64.-VOL. XI.

And one would suppose that Essays afford the pabulum on which the minds of country readers will love to feed. Take the country parson for instance,— and the country parson interest is 20,000 strong; will he not find just the sort of reading he wants in Essays (I do not mean "Essays and Reviews "), when he comes home to his fireside after going the rounds of his parish? Whilst he has been about his work--I am supposing him to be a conscientious man,— his mind has been on the stretch in the endeavour to infuse into other minds, duller and less intelligent than his own, certain great truths, which have to be adapted to the individual capacity of each person with whom he has been talking. He has been striving to rouse dead consciences, and to awaken love in cold hearts. He has been occupied in that most difficult work, applying special remedies to special diseases. Wearied and jaded with his labour, with a heart pierced and stained by contact with many forms of sin, as his feet are mudstained with the mire of the lanes through which they have passed, he comes home, to seek refreshment for mind and body. Now, what book shall he take up, when dinner is over, and the reading-lamp throws its cheerful light overdrawn curtains and crowded shelves? Fiction would seem too trivial; history, perhaps, too solid. The very thing for him would be a desultory chat, grave or gay, with some intellectual and talkative friend. And such a friend does he find in the Essayist.

For the Essay furnishes one of the few instances in which easy writing is at the same time easy reading. In the first place it is in some measure fragmentary, and can be taken up and put down at odd times. Then it does not profess much. It does not set out with drawing a heavy bill on our attention, and so we are all the more ready to honour its demands. It does not address us, so to speak, ex cathedrá. It assumes no judicial or magisterial functions; it rather comes to us as a cheerful, talkative friend who stops us in the street going to or coming from business, and

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gives us five minutes of pleasant chat before passing on his way. And, if an educated man of common average ability throws open his mind and tells us frankly his thoughts, this very frankness conciliates and disarms the criticism of the private reader; all the more, perhaps, because such unguardedness lays the writer open to the stings of professional criticism, and is therefore becoming rarer and rarer every day. We only ask that the writer shall be natural and unaffected in saying what he has to say: not a great demand truly—and yet not an everyday virtue this. Moreover, the Essay is almost the only form of literature in which we can pardon egotism. In truth egotism is here a virtue -provided, of course, that it is the egotism of a cultivated and thoughtful mind; what would be impertinent in other writers is not felt to be so in the Essayist; what would be trifling and mean in the Historian is not held to be

trifling and mean in him. For, if he would interest us, he must consider nothing too trivial to press into his service for illustration of his subject; he must give us all those little touches of manners, and feelings, and fancies, and facts which serve to give point and interest to the daily household chat of clever people. "For my part," says old Montaigne, à propos des bottes, "I am a great lover of your white wines." Upon which the younger Scaliger comments: "What the deuce does it matter to us whether he was a lover of white wines or red?" Why it matters thus much, that but for these little autobiographical touches revealing the man under the writer, Montaigne's Essays would have been what Scaliger's writings are, wellnigh unread dust-gathering, fly-entombing tomes upon scholastic bookshelves.

But it may be expected that in treating of Essay-writing some definition of the word Essay should be given, that its boundary and pomoerium should, at any rate, be fixed. Now this is a difficult thing to do. Any kind of definition is hard and unsatisfactory, and apt to obscure what before perhaps was plain

enough. Every one will remember as a case in point how the great lexicographer, who made sprats talk like whales, tried to explain the word "network" by calling it a reticulation. I would say then, that reviews of books, such as we meet with in the Quarterly and Edinburgh, are not Essays; nor are biographies, however condensed; nor are treatises, however unmethodical. The great charm of the Essay is that of a country footpath, which winds irregularly, and yet gets over the ground somehow; here skirting a coppice, there passing by a mill and its stream; now dipping into a hollow, and now climbing a hill; giving us the while many a picturesque bit of country life and scenery which an artist would like to frame and glaze, and hang upon his walls as a possession for ever. One might almost define the Essay, then, as a wit defined the science of metaphysics, as "l'art de s'egarer avec méthode." But then one must not altogether lose one's way. There must be a clue held in hand throughout. However the greyhounds of thought may twist and double, they must catch their hare at last. But one especial virtue the Essay should, at any rate, have-it must be short. I look upon the average run of Essays of the present day as altogether too long The Essay proper ought not to exceed those which we meet with in the Spectator, or in any of the fifty or sixty volumes which crowd old book-shelves under the title of "British Essayists." And, lastly, the Essay has no business to be political. My friend, we have newspapers enough; we have enough demand upon our thoughts for the day that is passing, with its wars and rumours of war, its successes or failures, its conflicts political, literary, religious. In these too we must take our part as becomes us, often perhaps upon opposite sides, working in the valleys of labour under the hot sun all day. But in the evening let us come forth and mount the hill together, having washed from our souls the taints and bitternesses of the fray, that we may meet the fresh breeze of heaven, and see the sunset still lingering in the sky.

My first acquaintanceships in Edinburgh, formed chiefly in and about the University, led to others and others of a more general kind, until, continuing to reside in that city after my direct connexion with the University had ceased, I settled into the more familiar society of a pretty definite group of very dear friends. For, though Edinburgh is of such a size that everybody in it may after a fashion know everybody else, yet even there affinities are at work, overruling opportunities, and bringing some into closer relations with each other than any which they can hold with the general body. And so, while there was not one member of the fraternity of which I speak that had not a range of acquaintances of his own in the general society of the place, this did not prevent, among the members collectively, a certain feeling as if they belonged peculiarly to each other. There was no external recognition of the fraternity, no approach to a club-organization. We simply liked to be together when we could, and, by various ways and means, were a good deal together. Now it would be the late evening chat and smoke of one or two of us-a kind of cabinet council for the rest in the rooms of one in particular; now it would be a short afternoon stroll of one or two, or three or four, of us; at intervals it would be a dinner or supper, volunteered by one who had household facilities for such hospitality; and the largest development which the thing took was, once or twice in the year, a hotel-dinner at Granton, a fish-dinner at Newhaven, or a joint excursion for a day to the Pentlands, ending not unconvivially in some inn near Hunters' Tryst. Once, at one of these larger

gatherings, we did propose to call ourselves a club; but, though we even thought of a name, the proposal came to nothing, as too precise and mechanical for our limited number and our subtle requirements. In vain, then, will the annals of modern Athens be searched for any documentary trace of what was, nevertheless, for some years prior to 1848, a very real, and not unimportant, fellowship of souls within its bounds. There still remain there, indeed, one or two who were of us, and who perchance, looking round among the new associates that time and change have given them, may sometimes revert in memory to the older ones that are gone, and even assert of them, "fuere fortes,' when they speak of them to their

successors

"They do not listen to my present singing,

The souls to whom I sang my maiden song; Dispersed the friendly few once round me clinging;

Silent, alas! the echoes heard so long; My sorrows to the ears of strangers bringing, I feel their very praise a kind of wrong, Since those who once delighted in my ditties Are dead, or scattered through the wide world's cities."

What was thus felt in Weimar, by the poet who saw himself surviving so many of his former friends, the same, with the due alteration in the mode of expressing it, must one or two men in the city of which I am now thinking feel on looking round them, and comparing the present with the past. Though their "singing" may be of no publie kind at all, but only the private utterance in unrestrained hours of whatever comes into their minds, for them also, whatever may be the compensation of new intimacies, there must be moments when they have a regretful pleasure in

surrounding themselves again in fancy with the faces of the earlier group. "Dead or scattered "-how true of that particular fraternity of which I speak! Methinks I hear one of its Edinburgh survivors reckoning up, for the information of the new-comers about him, the losses in both lists. So-and-so, and so-and-so, and yet such another, he would reckon among the scatteredtelling of them as still in the land of the living, but almost lost sight of by dispersion. Then, in the more sacred category of the dead, are there not at least two whom he would mention in chief Certainly, if the tradition of that one of the two whom I am to speak of in this paper has faded from the memory of Edinburgh, and is not there still fresh and bright, intellects are less discerning, and hearts are colder, than they used to be round Arthur Seat.

AGOSTINO RUFFINI.

He was, I may say, the centre of the group. Its constituting principle, I may say, was our common affection for Ruffini, Whatever we were individually, or in other relations, we might, as a fraternity, have been called the Ruffinians. Whoever in Edinburgh knew Ruffini with the due degree of intimacy was actually or potentially one of us. "Or potentially" I say, for it has happened that persons who never chanced to meet each other within the bounds of any of those little gatherings which I have called more especially those of the fraternity, have afterwards, on coming together, at once felt themselves old friends, on the simple ground of their having both been friends of Ruffini. All the more strange was this because Ruffini sought no such influence, and was quite unconscious of the magnetism that made him such a bond of union. In truth, when I think of it now, I suspect that our attractedness towards him must have sometimes been a trouble to him, and that, on many an evening when we gave him our company or compelled him to be one of us, he would rather have been smoking his pipe by

himself, reading his Dante, or, with his dark eyes fixed on the coals, pursuing the track of his own ruminations.

And who was this Ruffini ? Writing now, I may make him at once less unknown to many by saying that he was a younger brother of the Giovanni Ruffini whose "Lorenzo Benoni,” “Doctor Antonio," "Lavinia," and other stories, have within the last few years shown us how beautifully an Italian, though not residing among us, may write English, and have made it a pleasure to count him among our living English authors. Even before there was this means of introducing my friend, it might have been enough, so far as a few were concerned, to say that he was one of that family of the Ruffinis of Genoa whose sufferings in the old days of Piedmontese despotism are matter of historical record. In Louis Blanc's "History of Ten Years" may be read a reference in particular to the tragical death of one of the brothers, the young Jacopo Ruffini, after the discovery of the design of a general Italian insurrection organized in 1833 by the "Young Italy" party, and which was to have its beginning in Piedmont. But let me speak of Agostino Ruffini apart from such associations, and simply as he would have been recognised casually in Edinburgh in those days, before the apocalyptic '48, when insurrections and Italy were by no means such respectable things to the British imagination as they have become since. Well, to the casual view of Edinburgh in those days, he was a teacher of Italian. It was but a small effort of reasoning, however, to conclude, on seeing him, that such a man as he had not become a teacher of Italian in Edinburgh on the mere principle of voluntary tendency to the position of perfect felicity. To any one, therefore, who cared to inquire, it was not difficult to ascertain that he was a Genoese who had been driven into exile at an early age in consequence of some political turmoil in 1833 (no one pretended then to exact information about such events), and who, after leading the life of a refugee in Switzerland, Paris, and London, had come to Edinburgh in 1840 to

settle there at the age of about thirty. He had brought some introductions with him, and with such effect that, after living for a while in lodgings, he had pupils enough for his purpose, and found it convenient to become tenant of the upper part of a house in George Street, paying rent and taxes like an ordinary citizen. This house in George Street was his domicile during the whole time of his stay in Edinburgh after my acquaintance with him began. It was there that we used to drop in upon him in the evenings; it was thence that we lured him to join us elsewhere on any occasion we could devise; it was in virtue of the tendency of the footsteps and the thoughts of so many different persons thither that there was formed in Edinburgh what I have called the Ruffinian fraternity. Whenever I am in Edinburgh now, it is with a strange feeling of melancholy that I pass the house, and look up at what were Ruffini's windows.

Ruffini was a man of middle height, of spare figure, slightly bent forward at the shoulders by sedentary habits, of the normal dark Italian complexion, and with features also Italian but far from regular or handsome, the nose in particular blunted somewhat Socratically, but the brow full, and the eyes of a deep soft black. The general expression was grave, reserved, and gentle, with a possibility of sternness. Our northern climate and east winds told cruelly at times on his health and spirits; he was seldom long free from rheumatism or neuralgia, and was abnormally sensitive to malevolent approaching changes of weather. In all his personal habits he was scrupulously fastidious, conforming in every possible respect to English custom. Whether in his old dressing-gown, seated in the armchair in the plain attic room to which he confined his smoking, or as he walked out with his cane, or as he was to be seen in a drawing-room with other guests, his bearing was that of a quiet and perfectly-bred gentleman, who might have been mistaken for an Englishman, but for his Italian face and accent, and a certain ease of courtesy which was also Italian. So unwilling was he to take

the benefit of any allowance for his being a foreigner, in favour of any points of demeanour differing from the standard of those among whom he was living, that he had tried to cure himself of the habit of gesticulation when he spoke. He had done this in a very characteristic way, by writing on the margins of the books he most frequently took up the words, "Ruffini, don't gesticulate." He had succeeded in a great measure, but not quite. He retained some little movements with his shoulders and a peculiar emphatic lifting of his forefinger to his cheek, which gave great point to what he said, and which we would not willingly have parted with. Another spiteful thing he was driven to do to himself on the same principle. He wrote a most beautiful hand,-one of those very small, upright, print-like hands, with picturesquely-formed square letters, which seem to have been taught in the schools in some parts of Italy. He had heard so much said of this hand, had been praised for it so much, and questioned about it so much, that at length the thing became a horror to him, and he deliberately changed it for the worse,keeping the same square character in the writing, but making it more open and clumsy, so as effectually to stop farther flattery on that score. In such-like little traits of self-castigation and selfadjustment a higher reason, I believe, was involved than he avowed, or than such detached telling of them would suggest. It was not, most certainly it was not, that he wanted to doff or disguise the Italian. On the contrary, it was because of the very strength of his Italian self-respect. It was because of a regard for his country so deep and proud that it recoiled from the notion that his nationality should be identified with accidents, mannerisms, and trifles, and would take steps to rest the Italian claim only on its essentials.

He was, indeed, an Italian to the very soul. In the fact of his being an Italian, and so high and just a specimen of the race, lay the first and most general source of his impressiveness among us. He was sent among us by Providence,