History

Montaigne
Montaigne's "attempts" grew out of his commonplacing.[5] Inspired in particular by the works
of Plutarch, a translation of whose Œuvres Morales (Moral works) into French had just been
published by Jacques Amyot, Montaigne began to compose his essays in 1572; the first edition,
entitled Essais, was published in two volumes in 1580.[6] For the rest of his life, he continued revising
previously published essays and composing new ones. A third volume was published posthumously;
together, their over 100 examples are widely regarded as the predecessor of the modern essay.

Europe
While Montaigne's philosophy was admired and copied in France, none of his most immediate
disciples tried to write essays. But Montaigne, who liked to fancy that his family (the Eyquem line)
was of English extraction, had spoken of the English people as his "cousins", and he was early read
in England, notably by Francis Bacon.[7]
Bacon's essays, published in book form in 1597 (only five years after the death of Montaigne,
containing the first ten of his essays),[7] 1612, and 1625, were the first works in English that described
themselves as essays. Ben Jonson first used the word essayist in 1609, according to the Oxford
English Dictionary. Other English essayists included Sir William Cornwallis, who published essays in
1600 and 1617 that were popular at the time,[7] Robert Burton (1577–1641) and Sir Thomas
Browne (1605–1682). In Italy, Baldassare Castiglione wrote about courtly manners in his essay Il
Cortigiano. In the 17th century, the Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián wrote about the theme of
wisdom.[8]
In England, during the Age of Enlightenment, essays were a favored tool of polemicists who aimed
at convincing readers of their position; they also featured heavily in the rise of periodical literature, as
seen in the works of Joseph Addison, Richard Steele and Samuel Johnson. Addison and Steele
used the journal Tatler (founded in 1709 by Steele) and its successors as storehouses of their work,
and they became the most celebrated eighteenth-century essayists in England. Johnson's essays
appear during the 1750s in various similar publications.[7] As a result of the focus on journals, the
term also acquired a meaning synonymous with "article", although the content may not the strict
definition. On the other hand, Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is not an essay
at all, or cluster of essays, in the technical sense, but still it refers to the experimental and tentative
nature of the inquiry which the philosopher was undertaking.[7]
In the 18th and 19th centuries, Edmund Burke and Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote essays for the
general public. The early 19th century, in particular, saw a proliferation of great essayists in English
—William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt and Thomas De Quincey all penned numerous essays
on diverse subjects, reviving the earlier graceful style. Thomas Carlyle's essays were highly
influential, and one of his readers, Ralph Waldo Emerson, became a prominent essayist himself.
Later in the century, Robert Louis Stevenson also raised the form's literary level.[9] In the 20th
century, a number of essayists, such as T.S. Eliot, tried to explain the new movements in art and
culture by using essays. Virginia Woolf, Edmund Wilson, and Charles du Bos wrote literary criticism
essays.[8]
In France, several writers produced longer works with the title of essai that were not true examples
of the form. However, by the mid-19th century, the Causeries du lundi, newspaper columns by the
critic Sainte-Beuve, are literary essays in the original sense. Other French writers followed suit,
including Théophile Gautier, Anatole France, Jules Lemaître and Émile Faguet.[9]
Japan
Main article: Zuihitsu

As with the novel, essays existed in Japan several centuries before they developed in Europe with a
genre of essays known as zuihitsu—loosely connected essays and fragmented ideas. Zuihitsu have
existed since almost the beginnings of Japanese literature. Many of the most noted early works of
Japanese literature are in this genre. Notable examples include The Pillow Book (c. 1000), by court
lady Sei Shōnagon, and Tsurezuregusa (1330), by particularly renowned Japanese Buddhist
monk Yoshida Kenkō. Kenkō described his short writings similarly to Montaigne, referring to them as
"nonsensical thoughts" written in "idle hours". Another noteworthy difference from Europe is that
women have traditionally written in Japan, though the more formal, Chinese-influenced writings of
male writers were more prized at the time.

China
The eight-legged essay (Chinese: 八股文; pinyin: bāgǔwén; lit. 'eight bone text') was a style of
essay in imperial examinations during the Ming and Qing dynasties in China. The eight-legged essay
was needed for those test takers in these civil service tests to show their merits for government
service, often focusing on Confucian thought and knowledge of the Four Books and Five Classics, in
relation to governmental ideals. Test takers could not write in innovative or creative ways, but
needed to conform to the standards of the eight-legged essay. Various skills were examined,
including the ability to write coherently and to display basic logic. In certain times, the candidates
were expected to spontaneously compose poetry upon a set theme, whose value was also
sometimes questioned, or eliminated as part of the test material. This was a major argument in favor
of the eight-legged essay, arguing that it were better to eliminate creative art in favor of prosaic
literacy. In the history of Chinese literature, the eight-legged essay is often said to have caused
China's "cultural stagnation and economic backwardness" in the 19th century.[10]