It is “an age of personality,” wrote Coleridge in 1809 (Friend, II, 286–87), discomfited by the appetite of readers for details of the private lives of public figures and literary men. In this chapter, I investigate the role of allusion in fueling this appetite, focusing on the particular uses to which it was put in the new genre that, more than any other, characterized the age—the magazine essay. Shorter, lighter, less demanding than poetry, the essay was also more amusing and popular. In the hands of the coterie who wrote for the London Magazine, it was also informal, colloquial, spontaneous, intimate— celebrating the ordinary pleasures and bemoaning the routine pains of the metropolitan life that the essayists shared with their readers. These authors—disparagingly termed “Cockneys”—voiced with a new focus and zest the middlebrow perspective of London “cits”— shopmen and office workers. No deep learning or classical education was needed to enjoy their prose: although it shared some of the values defined in Wordsworth’s Excursion and Coleridge’s Biographia, readers did not have to grapple with Miltonic inversions or allusions to Schelling: the essay was user friendly.