The English essay is an artform.

The English essay, unlike the French essay, which, in Montaine, begins with philosophical reflections, grows instead out of journalism. Defoe was what he would now be considered a newspaperman to start.  He contributed spectacular and suspicious reports from all over about strange things that were happening, made credible in that they were like medieval tales of miracles in that they happened just over the next hill. Then Defoe turning to stories about exotic and far off narratives considered as novels, like “Robinson Crusoe” and “Roxanne”, reworking real material, until he wrote his magnificent “The Journal of the Plague Year”, so well described as if it had been reported rather than built on records, and not considered a novel because it had no dialogue or central figures but only the types of people, like healthy victims closeted in their houses with plague victims and the people who carried dead victims onto carts so that the bodies could be disposed of.