It culminated in 1864, when the country clergy, provoked by the final acquittal of the essayists, had voted in convocation against the endowment of the Greek chair.
Defoe's Review (1704-1713) dealt chiefly with politics and commerce, but the introduction in it of what its editor fittingly termed the "scandalous club " was another step nearer the papers of Steele and the periodical essayists, the first attempts to create an organized popular opinion in matters of taste and manners.
To speak of Montaigne is to speak of the best as well as the first of essayists.
His literary taste was conventional, including the standard British writers, with a preference for Shakespeare among the poets, Berkeley among the philosophers, and Montaigne (in Cotton's translation) among the essayists.
