Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > The Familiar Essay - Elements Of Content

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ELEMENTS OF CONTENT

Alexander Smith

SOURCE: "On the Writing of Essays," in A Book of Essays, edited by Blanche Colton Williams, D. C. Heath and Company, 1931, pp. 243-61.

[Smith was a respected nineteenth-century Scottish poet and familiar essayist. In the following excerpt from an essay included in his Dreamthorpe: A Book of Essays Written in the Country (1863), he writes from a rustic retreat of the familiar essayist's subject matter and wide-ranging habit of mind.]

Giddy people may think the life I lead here staid and humdrum, but they are mistaken. It is true, I hear no concerts, save those in which the thrushes are performers in the spring mornings. I see no pictures, save those painted on the wide sky-canvas with the colours of sunrise and sunset. I attend neither rout nor ball; I have no deeper dissipation than the tea-table; I hear no more exciting scandal than quiet village gossip. Yet I enjoy my concerts more...

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1. Introduction
2. Representative Works
3. Definitions And Origins
4. Overview Of The Genre
5. Elements Of Form And Style
6. Elements Of Content
7. The Cockneys: Hazlitt, Lamb, And Hunt
8. Status Of The Genre
9. Further Reading
10. Copyright

1. Essay