Excerpt from Essays, English and American The term essay is used loosely of many different kinds of literature, but almost always means a relatively short prose composition of an expository character. It may exist for some useful purpose, and resemble a brief treatise; or, at the opposite extreme, it may be wholly concerned with pleasurable talk about personal or even trivial things. Upon its subject matter, then, there are practically no limits at all. For the purposes of knowledge, we are likely to value most highly the essay which is most impersonal or objective, - that is, which emphasizes the subject under consideration and not the one con sidering it; for the purposes of pure literature, that essay is usually best which shows most of the writer's personality. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.