The would-be essayist wastes it in pretty writing about trivial things-neighbors' back yards, books I have read, the idiosyncrasies of cats, humors of the streets-the sort of dilettantish comment that older nations writing of more settled, richer civilizations can do well-that Anatole France and occasional essayists of Punch or The Spectator can do well and most of us do indifferently.
"Definitions"
Henry Seidel Canby