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Essayists, according to William Hazlitt, are, "if not moral philosophers, moral historians, and that's better: or they are both, they found the one character upon the other; their premises precede their conclusions."(1) In this lecture "On the Periodical Essayists," in Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819), Hazlitt praises the essayist's art as "the best and most natural course of study. It is in morals and manners what the experimental is in natural philosophy" (6:91). The influence of eighteenth-century moral philosophy on the English Romantics has most recently been explored by Alan Bewell in Wordsworth and the Enlightenment. Bewell convincingly argues that William Wordsworth's entire corpus, the individual lyrics as much as the long poems, comprises "poetic 'essays' on specific moral subjects, not only on the faculties of the mind (as in the 1815 classification of Poems), but also on the origin and progress of social institutions such as the family, property, religion, myth, poetry, and language." Thus, when the author of the Prelude states that "with my best conjectures I would trace / The progress of our being' ... he is stressing that autobiography is the key to the conjectural history of the species in general."(2)
Bewell's thesis has broad implications for our concept of English Romanticism. At first glance, the author of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb (1775-1834), would appear to be at odds with anything so systematic as eighteenth-century moral philosophy. Enlightenment rationalism is surely dismissed out of hand in his essay on "Imperfect Sympathies" where he rejects "Caledonian" rationalists in favor of their immethodical opposites. The latter, indeed, "are content with fragments and scattered pieces of Truth. She presents no full front to them--a feature or side-face at the most. Hints and glimpses, germs and crude essays at a system, is the utmost they pretend to."(3) Elia's putatively "crude essays at a system" notwithstanding, however, there is nothing crude about Lamb's essays or the construction of the persona who speaks for Lamb in them. Elia, of course, is that persona, a pseudonymous stand-in for the playful Lamb who, despite his arch, self-concealing authorial shifts, is remarkably candid about his opinions and prejudices in the fifty or so essays he originally published in the London Magazine...