"PROSE MASTERPIECES" AND "THE ENGLISH ESSAYISTS."
IT0 THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR." j SIR, —In your interesting review of "Prose Masterpieces from British Essayists," in your last /lumber, your reviewer wonders how such a good idea " has happened not to have been hit upon before."
Now, whatever may have been the sins and shortcomings of the volume, I happen to have edited for Nimmo's Standard Library a volume entitled " The English Essayists, a Comprehensive Selection from the Works of the Great Essayists, from Lord Bacon to John Ruskin." The book was published in 1876, and was and still continues to be, I believe, fairly popular. It contains, amongst other examples, complete essays by Bacon, Locke, Fuller, Cowley, Addison, Steele, Goldsmith, Johnson, HazlittrColeridge, Lamb, Leigh Hunt, De Quincey, Macaulay, Carlyle, and Ruskin. From copyright and other reasons, the book was, perhaps, not quite so representative of modern writers as it might otherwise have been.
About the same date (1876), I believe, Messrs. G. P. Putnam's Sons, the American publishers, began to issue the first volume of an intended series of " Select British Essayists," beginning with Addison and Steele.—I am, Sir, &a.
Edinburgh, March 9th. ROBERT COCHRANE.
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