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Starvard University · Arts
Meet Montaigne, who invented the essay by studying himself, Bacon, who packed wisdom into paragraphs, and Emerson, who taught America to trust itself.
Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this course.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
An essay is a person thinking on paper. One writer, long ago in France, locked himself in a tower and decided to write about the only subject he could study up close: himself. His questions became a new kind of writing. Another writer in England made essays as short and sharp as tools. A third, in America, wrote essays that sound like a friend urging you to trust your own mind. In this course you will meet all three, borrow their best tricks, and finish by writing an honest little essay about something you actually know. Three honest minds sound completely different, and that is the fun of it all.
Michel de Montaigne comes first, because he started it all. Retiring to his estate in his late thirties, he wrote short pieces that wander, doubt, quote old authors, and come back to himself. His motto was a question: what do I know? You will read him on friendship, which he knew deeply, on fear, which he watched in himself, and on death, which he learned to stop dreading. His warmth and honesty still feel modern, more than four hundred years later.
Then the course tightens. Francis Bacon writes essays like counsels for people who must act in the world: brief, balanced, and full of sentences that behave like proverbs. We read him on studies, truth, and riches. Finally Ralph Waldo Emerson takes the essay and makes it sing. In Self-Reliance, Friendship, and Compensation he argues that each person should trust the truth they find within and live it bravely. You will compare the three voices, note what each one can teach a writer today, and use all of them to write your own essay.
The whole course in brief
What you will be able to do after this course
The seven lessons
Lesson 1
Before Michel de Montaigne, nobody wrote quite like this. In 1580 this French nobleman, retired to a tower on his estate, published a book he called Essais, a word that means tries or attempts. He was not claiming to settle questions. He was trying his judgment out on them, in public, and seeing what happened. That humble idea, an attempt rather than a verdict, gave literature a new form that we still use every day.
His subject was himself. In his note to the reader he says it straight: 'Thus, reader, myself am the matter of my book.' He paints his own changing moods, habits, doubts, and bodily life, because he is the one specimen of a human being he can observe from the inside, all day, for free. When he writes about sadness, coaches, thumbs, or custom, he keeps circling back to a single honest question: what do I actually know, and how do I know it?
That is why Montaigne still feels like a friend. He quotes Roman authors, tells a story about his horse, contradicts himself, and admits it. The essay, in his hands, is a mind moving. As you read him, watch the movement, not just the conclusions. The wandering is the method.
Lesson 2
Montaigne's essay Of Friendship honors Etienne de La Boetie, his closest friend, who died young. Ordinary friendships, Montaigne says, can be divided into parts and explained. This one could not. Their souls mixed so completely that the seam disappeared. Asked why he loved his friend, he could only answer in the famous circle: because it was he, because it was I. Some bonds have no reason underneath them. They are simply given, and losing them leaves a shaped hole.
On fear, he is just as frank about himself. 'The thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear,' he writes, noting how that one passion can unseat reason entirely. Fear, for Montaigne, is not cured by pretending to be brave. It is studied, named, and watched, the way he watches everything in himself, until it becomes a known habit rather than a mysterious master.
His essay on death argues that to philosophize is to learn how to die. He does not mean brooding. He means practice. If you keep death familiar, like a neighbor you greet often, it loses its power to ambush you. Nature, he says, teaches that leaving life should be as natural as entering it was.
Lesson 3
Francis Bacon wrote the opposite way from Montaigne. Where Montaigne wanders for pages, Bacon compresses. His Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral, finished in 1625, are short pieces of advice for people who live and work in the world: on negotiation, ambition, gardens, travel, anger, and dozens more. Each essay may be only a page or two, but nearly every sentence is built to be remembered and quoted.
Read one of his sentences slowly: 'Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.' That is from Of Studies, and you will study it next lesson. Notice the craft. Three balanced parts. A picture drawn from eating that anyone can hold. A whole theory of reading in seventeen words. Bacon's balanced clauses, often in pairs or triples, give his prose its feeling of calm, weighed judgment.
Bacon was a lawyer, a courtier, and a Lord Chancellor, and it shows. He rarely confesses and never wanders. He advises. The risk in reading him is speed. His paragraphs look simple and slide past quickly. Resist that. Take one sentence, say it aloud, and ask what experience it is squeezing. A Bacon paragraph can hold a year of observation.
Lesson 4
Of Studies is Bacon's guide to reading with judgment. 'Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted,' he warns, 'but to weigh and consider.' Studies make a person full, conversation makes them ready, and writing makes them exact, he says, because writing forces vague thoughts to show themselves. He even matches studies to minds the way exercises match bodies: if your attention wanders, study mathematics, where one lapse means starting over.
Of Truth opens with a hard question: 'What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.' Bacon argues that people often love the lie itself, not just the profit from lying, because a clear truth can feel like harsh daylight. Yet he ends firmly: clear knowledge and honest dealing are the sober, honorable course, and a lie, he writes, faces God and shrinks from human judgment.
Of Riches brings him back to earth. 'Riches are for spending, and spending for honor and good actions,' he says. Wealth is a tool, good for what it does, dangerous when it becomes the point. Seek it honestly, hold it lightly, use it well. That steady, practical note runs through all three essays: weigh things, prefer truth, and let money serve life rather than rule it.
Lesson 5
Ralph Waldo Emerson published Self-Reliance in his Essays, First Series, in 1841, and it became the great American statement of trusting your own mind. Its most quoted line is a command: 'Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.' Emerson argues that the thoughts you dismiss as merely yours are the ones that matter most, because in your own work, he says, you should accept the genius that is already in you rather than borrowing someone else's.
His sharpest claim follows: 'Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.' Society, he thought, pressures everyone to agree, repeat, and fit in, and that pressure quietly trades away a person's real life. He is not praising selfishness or rudeness. He is saying that a perception you have honestly reached is a trust to act on, even when it makes you misunderstood for a while. 'To be great is to be misunderstood,' he writes, and lists Pythagoras, Socrates, and Jesus among the misunderstood.
Self-Reliance is not a system. It is a series of sparks: aphorisms, images, and challenges meant to wake a reader up. Read it in small pieces, copy out the sentence that stings you most, and argue with it in a notebook. Emerson would have approved of the argument.
Lesson 6
Emerson's essay Friendship refuses to be sentimental. 'I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage,' he writes. 'When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we know.' A friend, for Emerson, is someone before whom you can be fully sincere, with no performance and no disguise. That is why real friendship is rare and slow. It needs truth and tenderness together, and it cannot be forced, scheduled, or faked for advantage.
Compensation takes a different question: is life fair? Emerson answers that a deep balance runs through things. 'Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature,' he writes, in day and night, heat and cold, and in human life too. Every gift carries a cost, every loss hides a gain, and every excess corrects itself in time. You cannot cheat this law for long, and you do not need to avenge yourself against it either.
Together the two essays balance each other. Friendship tells you to give yourself honestly to another person. Compensation tells you to trust that honest giving is never finally lost. What you send into the world, Emerson believes, returns by a law deeper than luck.
Lesson 7
You have three models now, so borrow openly. From Montaigne, borrow the subject: yourself, honestly examined. From Bacon, borrow the sentence: short, balanced, and built to last. From Emerson, borrow the courage: say what you actually think, in your own voice, and let the chips fall. A first essay needs one question you genuinely wonder about. Why do I keep this habit? What did that loss teach me? What do I know about friendship from one friend?
Draft the Montaigne way first. Write fast, wander, tell the story, quote nobody, admit what you do not know. This draft is an attempt, so let it be messy. Then revise the Bacon way. Go sentence by sentence and squeeze. Cut any sentence that only repeats the one before it. Turn one good observation into a balanced line you would be proud to have quoted back at you.
Finish the Emerson way. Read the draft aloud and mark the one place where you softened what you really think to stay safe. Restore your honest version there, if you can stand it. That spot is usually the heart of the essay. Keep the piece short, five or six paragraphs is plenty, give it a plain title, and share it with one reader you trust.
Sources
This course is taught from classic texts that are free for anyone to read. Every method in the lessons traces back to one of these books.
Graduation
Montaigne, Bacon, and Emerson could hardly write more differently, yet they share one habit: each looked hard at real life and reported what he found, in sentences that still work centuries later. That habit is now available to you. Keep a notebook, try your judgment on small questions, and write your attempts down. An essay does not need a grand topic. It needs an honest mind paying attention, which is exactly what these three writers spent their lives practicing, and what your own first essay has already begun.
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A note on accuracy: Much of what you read at Starvard was created with help from AI agents, working alongside people. We check what we can, but we cannot guarantee that everything here is true, current, or complete. If something really matters, your health, your money, a grade, a job, please verify it with a trusted source before you rely on it.