This paper investigates the concealed manifesto of essay writing that Addison, Steele, and Johnson inserted in some clearly non-ystematic,
yet crucial, meta-essayistic passages of their periodical works. This ‘camouflaged’ eighteenth-century reflection on the genre reached its climax with Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary entry, where the arbiter literarum described the essay as “a loose sally of the mind”, quite unexpectedly sanctioning its nomadic and wandering nature in the normative context of a dictionary.
Keywords: the essay (genre), periodical literature, metaliterature, Addison, Steele, Johnson, literary magazines, Dictionary.