[Squire was an English man of letters who, as a poet, lent his name to the "Squire-archy," a group of poets who struggled to maintain the Georgian poetry movement of the early twentieth century. He was also a prolific critic who was involved with many important English periodicals; he founded and edited the London Mercury, served as literary and, later, acting editor of the New Statesman, and contributed frequently to the Illustrated London News and the Observer. Squire's criticism, like his poetry, is considered traditional and good natured. In the following excerpt from a BBC radio lecture from the early 1930s, he defines and discusses the familiar essay, naming Abraham Cowley as the 'first English essayist in the modern sense": the source from which sprang the nineteenth-century writers of the familiar essay.]

The word "essay" is an intimidating one to the vast majority of the British population. It carries with it memories of efforts at school to compose one or two laborious pages on "How I Spent my Holidays," or "Which would you rather be, a Sailor or a Soldier?" It has, by the same token, painful associations for me. The first piece of really careful prose I ever remember writing was composed for a school essay on "Egypt." I thought of the Sphinx and the Pyramids, of Philae and the Valley of the Kings, of the Pharaohs going back into the mists of remote antiquity; I thought of the ancient Nile, rising in the mysterious Mountains of the Moon and flowing past all those monuments now, when they are crumbling, as of old when they were bright and new; and I laid myself out to write Ruskinian paragraphs full of colour and cadence, in which the words "illimitable" and "eternal" occurred much more frequently than I should allow them to occur now. "Well," thought I to myself complacently, "I can't imagine that anybody else has done anything like that." Did I get a prize? No; I wasn't even commended. All that happened was that I was taken aside by a master, who knitted his brows and bit his lips, and asked from what author I had copied out the passage on which I had dwelt most lovingly—the passage fullest of the venerable river, the immemorial sands, and the brooding spirit of antiquity. When I denied that I had copied it from anybody, I was invited to consider the old maxim that "lying only makes the offence worse," and I ended by narrowly escaping a beating for having the germs of a poet in me. This by the way; but I was trying to write one type of essay when another type was wanted. I was expected to write: "Egypt is a very old country. There was once a ruler there, a very wicked man called Pharaoh, who was drowned in the Red Sea for persecuting the Jews. The chief sights of Egypt are the Pyramids, which are not all the same size, and the Sphinx, which is a very large Sphinx."

Well, we are not talking about school essays. Nor are we talking about scientific, religious, political, and economic essays. Malthus wrote an Essay on Population; probably at this moment somebody is writing an Essay on the most advantageous use of Phosphate Manures in Metalliferous Areas. The word "essay," in English, covers a multitude if not of sins at least of painstaking dullnesses. But when one talks of "The English Essay," one does not think of these or even of critical essays, however excellent, like Matthew Arnold's or Walter Bagehot's, but of a particular kind of wandering, personal thing which has flourished in England as nowhere else.…

The first English essayist in the modern sense was Abraham Cowley, whose essays (though in print at the Oxford University Press) are at the present time as neglected as his ingenious and, occasionally, lovely poems. "Who now reads Cowley?" asked Pope, more than two hundred years ago. The question might still be asked, but all the time he had had a few affectionate lovers. Listen to this, written in the middle of the seventeenth century—the beginning of an essay which at once shows Cowley's consciousness of whence his essays derived and forecasts the whole tone of the English essay from his day onward. It comes from his essay, On Greatness.

Since we cannot attain to greatness, says the Sieur de Montaigne, let us have our revenge by railing at it: this he spoke but in jest. I believe he desired it no more than I do, and had less reason, for he enjoyed so plentiful and honourable a fortune in a most excellent country, as allowed him all the real conveniences of it, separated and purged from the incommodities. If I were but in his condition, I should think it hard measure, without being convinced of any crime, to be sequestered from it, and made one of the principal officers of state. But the reader may think that what I now say is of small authority, because I never was, nor ever shall be, put to the trial; I can therefore only make my protestation.

If ever I more riches did desire
Than cleanliness and quiet do require;
If e'er ambition did my fancy cheat,
With any wish so mean as to be great,
Continue, Heaven, still from me to remove
The humble blessings of that life I love.

I know very many men will despise, and some pity me, for this humour, as a poor-spirited fellow; but I am content, and, like Horace, thank God for being so.… I confess I love littleness almost in all things. A little convenient estate, a little cheerful house, a little company, and a very little feast; and if I were ever to fall in love again (which is a great passion, and therefore I hope I have done with it), it would be, I think, with prettiness rather than with majestical beauty.

Honesty and whimsicality—and confidential buttonholing: there are all the things here that make people love Charles Lamb. The pedigree is straight from that to Hazlitt's On Going a Journey:

The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases. We go a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind, much more to get rid of others. It is because I want a little breathingspace to muse on indifferent matters … that I absent myself from the town for a while, without feeling at a loss the moment I am left by myself. Instead of a friend in a post-chaise or in a Tilbury, to exchange good things with, and vary the same stale topics over again, for once let me have a truce with impertinence. Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner—and then to thinking!

I may be doing a few people a service if I recommend a perusal of the essays of Abraham Cowley.

Since him, what a procession! There are obscurer men whom I might mention. I should like to send readers back to the neglected essays of Alexander Smith, whose The Lark Ascending (you may know his poem Barbara in the Oxford Book) is one of the most beautiful and thoughtful essays in English. But Addison, Steele, Johnson, Lamb, Hazlitt—it would require hours to celebrate adequately their contributions to our enjoyment. And in our own day Mr. Beerbohm, Mr. Lynd, Mr. Knox, Mr. Belloc, Mr. Lucas, Mr. Chesterton have continued the old tradition. We may regret that they mostly write so briefly: that cannot be helped; a contributor to periodicals has to write to the length required. All these authors would doubtless pour themselves out much more fully and ingeniously were they invited to write at Charles Lamb's length, and we may regret that (with the exception of Mr. Beerbohm) they do not. But it is agreeable to see spirit triumphing over matter, and posterity will take pleasure in the spectacle of men of letters of our own day continuing to compress their effusions within the limits of a newspaper column and still keep their freshness, their humour, their sense of beauty, and their capacity for exposing themselves as specimens of mankind.