Essay, Essay, Essay Again

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The essay, as everyone knows, is a dying art. The grand old days of Hazlitt, Lamb, Coleridge. Emerson, Chesterton, Shaw, Virginia Woolf et al - happy times when we could dip at will into the best thoughts of the best minds and draw out maxims for life, pausing only to restoke an aromatic pipe - have long since passed, Even the moralising Victorian tub-thumpers (Mill, Ruskin, Arnold, Bagehot) play to empty houses. These days, we rely on self-help manuals and astrology for that sort of thing. Essays? We don't really trust 'em: they too closely resemble sermons or lectures; they make us want to fidget or giggle. Essays are what we slog through at university, what we have crises …