How Hazlitt in "On Gusto" and Steele in The Spectator No. 84 Appeal to the Reader's Emotions Anonymous College

The scholar Denise Gigante described the great age of the English essay as “a vibrant gallery of personae speaking in a multiplicity of voices”[1]. This can be represented vividly by the two essays “On Gusto” by William Hazlitt and Richard Steele’s essay No. 84 in The Spectator. Both essays are starkly different in style and approach, and more importantly both rely heavily on the emotional response of the reader. They are two excellent examples of how diverse and intense the English essay can be, whilst at the same time employing an abundance of literary techniques to coax the desired response from the reader, whether this is frustration, shock or wonder. They also achieved this through the boundaries that the genre of the English essay allowed them to cross, giving them more freedom to the hearts of readers; “essayists preferred to address readers as confidants, taking them into the private space of the study to consider human nature and events in a more relaxed manner”[2].

There is the same sort of passion detected in both of the essays, but in Steele’s essay it is a lot more dramatic, heavy and melancholy: Pharamond calls his friends entrance as “The Gate of the Unhappy”[3] and his crying “Tears of the Afflicted”[4]. Of...