This chapter defines ‘criticism’, adapting John Dryden and Samuel Johnson, as a judicative, explicative, and appreciative encounter with literature. And in doing so, it sorts the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ‘essay’ into three rough groupings: (1) digressive essays in the manner of Montaigne; (2) treatise essays like Dryden’s Of Dramatick Poesie; and (3) periodical essays like The Tatler and The Spectator. Following a thread of allusions to Cato the Younger through the works of Montaigne, Addison, Pope, and Elizabeth Montagu, I show how an important feature of modern close reading, the grammatically integrated quotation, grows out of the eighteenth-century critical essay.