Montaigne's study was a tower, walled all about with books. At his table in the midst he was the general focus of their wisdom. Hazlitt wrote much at an inn at Winterslow, with Salisbury Plain around the corner of his view. Except for ill health, and a love of the South Seas (here was the novelist showing itself), Stevenson would probably have preferred a windy perch overlooking Edinburgh.
It does seem as if rather a richer flavor were given to a book by knowing the circumstance of its composition. Consequently readers, as they grow older, turn more and more to biography. It is not chiefly the biographies that deal with great crises and events, but rather the biographies that are concerned with small circumstance and agreeable gossip.
Lately in a book-shop at the foot of Cornhill I fell in with an old scholar who told me that it was his practice to recommend four books, which, taken end on end, furnished the general history of English writing from the Restoration to a time within his own memory. These books were Pepy's "Diary," Boswell's "Johnson," the "Letters and Diaries" of Madame D'Arblay, and the "Diary" of Crabbe Robinson.
Beginning almost with the days of Cromwell, here is a chain of pleasant gossip the space of more than two hundred years. Perhaps at the first there were old fellows still alive who could remember Shakespeare; who still sat in chimney-corners and babbled through their toothless gums of Blackfriars and the Globe. And at the end we find a reference to President Lincoln and his freeing of the slaves.
Here are a hundred authors, perhaps a thousand, tucking up their cuffs, looking out from their familiar windows, scribbling their masterpieces.
"The Writing of Essays" by Charles S. Brooks appeared in the collection Modern Essays and Stories, edited by Frederick Houk Law (Century Company, 1922)
