In 1863, Alexander Smith (1830-67) published Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country , which marks the return and evolution of a familiar essay spirit that had waned during the middle third of the century. The essays in this slim book celebrate life on a rural estate and, more importantly, the perspective of Smith himself. Overtly narrative and autobiographical in their content, they demonstrate the qualities Smith describes in "On the Writing of Essays," in which he distinguishes between the "serious and stately" tradition out of Bacon and the "garrulous and communicative" tradition out of Montaigne. Smith notes that "The essayist plays with his subject, now in whimsical, now in grave, now in melancholy mood . . . His main gift is an eye to discover the suggestiveness of common things; to find a sermon in the most unpromising texts." Plain country life is one such text, but Smith's essays are hardly trivial. "A Lark's Flight," for example, deals with issues of capital punishment, but his method is primarily narrative. He recounts watching the hanging of two prisoners and how, at a pivotal moment, a lark flies off singing, the poignancy of the event indicating to him the horror of such occasions. (George Orwell's "A Hanging" [ 1931] would later use a happy dog to similar effect.) These essays are grounded not in abstract ideas or books but in direct experience.

Richard Jefferies (1848-87) shared both Smith's topical matter and his stance, representing the countryside to a largely urban audience. Like Smith, he centers much of his work in place (as in Round About a Great Estate , 1880) and relishes close descriptions of scenes from nature.

More famous than either Smith or Jefferies is Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94), whose essays in Virginibus Puerisque (1881), Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882), and Memories and Portraits (1887) recall the style of Lamb and Hazlitt. In several of his essays, such as "An Apology for Idlers" (1877), Stevenson writes successions of aphoristic pronouncements in a vein growing out of Bacon; in others,

such as "A College Magazine" (1887), he narrates his own experiences. The interaction of these poles in the bulk of his work distinguishes the familiar essay at the end of the century from the critical and philosophical works of writers like Arnold and Mill. Ruskin's essays have some of this quality but with the dramatic difference that Ruskin had a sharp political edge and little of the drawing room sentimentality that some have found in Stevenson.

The end and turn of the century thus saw the rise of an essay genre which contrasted strongly with the intellectual essay: the familiar essay as leisure reading and entertainment, an essay less serious in either form or intention. Max Beerbohm 's (1872-1956) essays are perhaps the highest achievement in this manner, and though he published essays well into the 1920s, he is most often associated with the turn of the century. Partly this is because of Beerbohm's own themes and persona as a man out of step with his times, as much older than his years. In "Diminuendo" (1896), written when he was 24, he describes himself (Elia-like) as already outmoded, and this gentle self-deprecating presentation characterizes most of his essays. Beginning as a writer for the Yellow Book and the Strand , Beerbohm published numerous collections, including the satirically titled Works of Max Beerbohm, with a Bibliography (1896), More (1899), Yet Again (1909), and And Even Now (1920), the very titles suggesting the playful enterprise that he and his readers enjoyed. The quality can be seen in a piece like "Going out for a Walk," which begins with "It is a fact that not once in all my life have I gone out for a walk. I have been taken out for walks; but that is another matter," signaling in tone, topic, and stance the easy personal tone and relationship his readers had come to expect.

Beerbohm's contemporary, Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), shares elements of both his ethos and his sense of the essay as entertainment, as can be seen through the titles of his own volumes, including On Nothing and Kindred Subjects (1908), On Everything (1909), On Anything (1910), On Something (1910), and four others in a similar vein. Belloc writes on places and landscapes and on past authors (thus appreciations rather than reviews), as well as on "minor" occasional topics, such as "The Crooked Streets" (1912), in which a whole quality of life is invoked by the way a town deploys its roads. In "An Essay upon Essays upon Essays" (1951), he spoofs the already common subgenre.

A third contemporary and a friend of Belloc, G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), similarly used a casual, even light tone in his diverse essays on familiar topics. A voluminous writer, of novels and detective stories as well as nonfiction, recalling in many respects Hazlitt in his critical as well as familiar essays and in his journalistic interests (including cofounding and editing the periodical Eye Witness in 1911), Chesterton filled a belletristic role common since Addison, Johnson, and the Romantics. Virginia Woolf would fill this role, too, but in a manner more distinctly modern. Chesterton's many essay volumes, including The Defendant (1901), All Things Considered (1908), Alarms and Discursions (1910), A Defence of Nonsense and Other Essays (1911), and All I Survey (1933) demonstrate through their diversity of subject matter and confidence of narrative voice a quality essential to the essay: the claim of a right to explore and explain a position on any topic, simply by virtue of being a careful and sensitive observer.

The revitalization of the familiar essay hardly came at the expense of critical works. Henry James ' (1843-1916) discussions of various writers in Partial Portraits (1888) exemplify his extensive critical writings, which include those essays he wrote as critical prefaces to his own novels. However, James also wrote numerous travel essays, primarily for American magazines like the Atlantic Monthly , the Nation , and the North American Review . Collected in such volumes as Transatlantic Sketches (1875) and Portraits of Places (1883), these essays reveal subtle changes in periodicals as distant travel becomes more possible (or at least imaginable), and magazines extend their editorial borders to new places.

James, of course, belongs to that growing tradition throughout the 19th century of writers best known in one literary genre but who wrote essays "on the side." Not only novelists like James or poets like Arnold but also dramatists like George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) are customarily acknowledged secondarily (if at all) as essayists. This common idea of the essay as a genre supplemental to one's "real work" perhaps originates with Montaigne's modesty, and it may have resulted in essays being excluded from serious study throughout much of their history. That writers like Beerbohm, Belloc, and Chesterton could be known primarily as essayists is a new development in many ways and, in others, a rebirth of the early 18th century.