Error.—Faërie Queene, Spenser. A monster who lived in a den in “Wandering Wood,” and with whom the Red-cross Knight had his first adventure. She had a brood of one thousand young ones of sundry shapes, and these cubs crept into their mother’s mouth when alarmed, as young kangaroos creep into their mother’s pouch. The knight was nearly killed by the stench which issued from the foul fiend, but he succeeded in “rafting” her head off, whereupon the brood lapped up the blood, and burst with satiety.
Escalus (es´ka-lus).—An ancient and kind hearted lord, in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, whom Vincentio, the duke of Vienna, joins with Angelo as his deputy during a pretended absence on a distant journey.
Escanes (es´ka-nēz).—A lord of Tyre, in Shakespeare’s Pericles.
Esmeralda.—Notre Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo. A beautiful gypsy girl, who, with tambourine and goat, dances in the “place” before Notre Dame.
Esmond, Henry.—A cavalier and fine-spirited gentleman in the reign of Queen Anne. Hero of Thackeray’s novel by the same name.
Esmond.—A novel by W. M. Thackeray, published in 1852. Its most striking feature is its elaborate imitation of the style and even the manner of thought of the time of Queen Anne’s reign, in which its scenes are laid.
Esprit des Lois [es-prē´ dâ lwa (or, Spirit of the Laws)].—A celebrated philosophical work by Montesquieu, published at Geneva in 1748. The author begins somewhat formally with the old division of politics into democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy. He discusses the principles of each, and their bearings on education, on positive law, on social conditions, on military strength (offensive and defensive) on individual liberty, on taxation and finance. Then an abrupt return is made from the effects to the causes of constitutions and polity. The theory of the influence of physical conditions, and especially of climate, on political and social institutions—a theory which is perhaps more than any other identified with the book—received special attention, and a somewhat disproportionate space is given to the question of slavery in this connection. From climate Montesquieu passes to the nature of the soil as in its turn affecting civil polity. He then attacks the subject of manners and customs as distinct from laws of trade and commerce, of the family, of jurisprudence, of religion. The book concludes with an elaborate examination of the feudal system in France.
Essay on Man.—A poem by Alexander Pope, in four epistles: Of the Nature and State of Man With Respect to the Universe; Of the Nature and State of Man With Respect to Himself as an Individual; Of the Nature and State of Man With Respect to Society; and Of the Nature and State of Man With Respect to Happiness. Its fundamental idea is to the effect that the system of the universe is a “benevolent system, in which every virtue, as well as every passion, has its object and end.”
“If,” says Professor Ward, “the Essay on Man were shivered into fragments, it would not lose its value; for it is precisely its details which constitute its moral as well as literary beauties. Nowhere has Pope so abundantly displayed his incomparable talent of elevating truisms into proverbs, in his mastery over language and poetic form.”
Essays (or, Counsels Civil and Moral).—By Francis, Lord Bacon. In the dedication to his brother Anthony, the author says he published the Essays “because many of them had been stolen abroad in writing,” and he desired to give the world a correct version of his work. The word Essays, he says, “is late; but the thing is ancient, for Seneca’s Epistles to Lucilius, if you mark them well, are but essays, that is, dispersed meditations, though conveyed in the form of epistles.” “The transcendent strength of Bacon’s mind is visible.” says Hallam, “in the whole tenor of these Essays, unequaled as they must be, from the very nature of such compositions. They are deeper and more discriminating than any earlier, or almost any later, work, in the English language; full of recondite observations, long matured, and carefully sifted.”