The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: English traits [Vol. 5]

NOTES

NOTES

ENGLISH TRAITS

WHEN Mr. Emerson first sailed for Europe he was, no doubt, urged by physicians to the measure to restore his shattered health, and by his friends, that his mind might be diverted by the scenes rich in beauty and association, and by the treasuries of art. Then and through life he cared little for travel for amusement; he had all the beauty and the facts that he wanted in the home horizon; but previous experience had shown him that even a rough sea-voyage was helpful, and this trip involved two, in sailing vessels. More than that, he had left his old life behind and now had opportunity to think out alone the plan of the life about to begin. Two or three men lived in Europe the courage and freshness of whose thoughts had cheered and helped him. In his sadder hours he almost wished to find a helpful Master, but his heart told him that this could not be, and thus answered the wish of his weakness:—

Journal, Rome, April 22, 1833. "Our stern experience replies with the tongue of all its days. Son of Man! it saith, all giving and receiving is reciprocal; you entertain angels unawares, but they cannot impart more or higher things than you are in a state to receive, but every step of your progress affects the intercourse you hold with all others; elevates its tone, deepens its meaning, sanctifies its spirit."

But, in the loneliness of an ancient city, and beset with sad memories of home, he felt assurance of helpful and strengthening friendship soon to come. He was to find that friend in Carlyle.

The verses "In Naples" are sad; the last lines of those "Written at Rome" (see Appendix to the Poems) show hope reviving with health:—

Generously trust Thy fortune's web to the beneficent hand That until now has put his world in fee To thee. He watches for thee still. His love Broods over thee, and as God lives in heaven, However long thou walkest solitary, The hour of heaven shall come, the man appear.

Six months before, he had written in his journal: "I am cheered and instructed by this paper on Corn Law Rhymes in the Edinburgh by my Germanick new-light writer, whoever he be. He gives us confidence in our principles. He assures the truth-lover everywhere of sympathy. Blessed art that makes books, and so joins me to that stranger by this perfect railroad."

A few weeks later, having found the name of the unknown champion, he writes,—his sickness showing in the shade of doubt:—

"If Carlyle knew what an interest I have in his persistent Goodness, would it not be worth one effort more, one prayer, one mediation. But will he resist the deluge of bad example in England? One manifestation of goodness in a noble soul brings him in debt to all the beholders that he shall not betray their love and trust which he has awakened."

During his short stay in France on his way northward, of which there is no mention in English Traits, he made this entry:—

"Thus shall I write memoirs? A man who was no courtier, but loved men, went to Rome and there lived with boys.

He came to France and in Paris lives alone, and in Paris seldom speaks. If he do not see Carlyle in Edinburgh, he may go to America without saying anything in earnest except to Cranch and to Landor."

In lonely Nithsdale he found the friend he was seeking, not the teacher, and found also, as the Spirit had said, that, even with angels found unawares, all giving and receiving is reciprocal.

"That man came to see me," said Carlyle to Richard Monckton Milnes. "I don't know what brought him, and we kept him one night and then he left us. I saw him go up the hill; I did n't go with him to see him descend. I preferred to watch him mount and vanish like an angel."

But it was the Carlyle that God meant, that Emerson loved, and through all the years of their lives—fortunately with the ocean between—it was this Carlyle that he regarded and addressed, not the sad prophet denouncing the world of his day.

More contemporary side-lights will be given in the notes to the pages describing their intercourse.

The young man's wish to see Wordsworth and Coleridge was gratified, but little was gained by the sight at near range of these masters of poetry and philosophy.

Journal, September, 1833. "It occurs forcibly, yea, somewhat pathetically, that he who visits a man of genius out of admiration for his parts should treat him tenderly. 'T is odds but he will be disappointed. That is not the man of genius's fault,—he was honest and human, but the fault of his [the visitor's] own ignorance of the limits of human excellence. Let him feel then that his visit was unwelcome, and that he is indebted to the tolerance and good nature of his idol, and so spare him the abuse of his own reacting feelings,—the backstroke."

At the time of his first visit to England Mr. Emerson had published nothing and of course was entirely unknown. It is said that he preached once or twice in London; if so, of course at Unitarian chapels, but of this I find no authentic record. His friend, Mr. Alexander Ireland, then of Edinburgh, to whose charge Dr. Samuel Brown, "the chemical philosopher," had committed him, says in his memoirs,1 1.1 that he heard him deliver a discourse in the Unitarian Chapel in that city, and tells of the effect produced on his hearers. "It is almost needless to say that nothing like it had ever been heard by them before, and many of them did not know what to make of it. The originality of his thoughts, the consummate beauty of the language in which they were clothed, the calm dignity of his bearing … and the singular directness and simplicity of his manner, free from the least shadow of dogmatic assumption, made a deep impression upon me."

The second visit to England was made under quite other conditions. Nature and the two volumes of Essays, sent at first to a few friends, had found readers in England enough to warrant publication of editions there. Mr. Emerson's friends, those who knew him personally and those whom his writings had won him, wished to see him and hear his thoughts from his own lips. Mr. Ireland made Mr. William Lloyd Garrison, then returning to Boston, the bearer of a generous and urgent invitation to consider the project of a lengthened visit to England and the delivery of lectures in the chief towns, Mr. Ireland himself assuming the burden of the necessary correspondence and business arrangements. The proposal was seconded by friendly and hospitable letters from Carlyle.

He urged Mr. Emerson's coming on another score. "Unquestionably

you would get an immense quantity of food for ideas, though perhaps not at all in the way you anticipate, in looking about among us: nay, if you even thought us stupid, there is something in the godlike indifference with which London will accept and sanction even that verdict—something highly instructive at least."

Learning from a delayed letter that Emerson was actually on the seas, Carlyle sent with all urgency a letter to meet him on landing, saying, "Know then, my Friend, that in verity your home is here … and here surely, if anywhere in the wide earth, there ought to be a brother's welcome and kind home waiting you! Yes, by Allah!"

He landed in the end of October, 1847. After a short visit to Carlyle, he returned to Manchester, where lived Mr. Ireland, of whom he said, "he approves himself the king of all friends and helpful agents … active, unweariable, imperturbable." Thanks to his zeal and influence through his paper, the Manchester Examiner, Mr. Emerson found arrangements made for courses in Liverpool and Manchester, and lectures in the important towns in the midland and northern counties, which occupied him until February. Mechanics' institutes afforded him many of his audiences, in some respects like those of country Lyceums at home, and quite as agreeable to him as the gathering of more aristocratic hearers in London.

In February he went to Edinburgh. Mr. Ireland says, "His four lectures created a great sensation in the Scottish metropolis and stirred the hearts of many independent thinkers. The orthodox of that firm stronghold of religious formalism were grieved and shocked, although Emerson, knowing the tone of feeling there, had, with the utmost delicacy, avoided such subjects as might bring him into direct contact with it."

He quotes a hearer as saying, "What a quiet, calm conversation it is! It is not the seraph or burning one you see; it is the cherubic reason thinking aloud before you. It is a soul totally unsheathed you have to do with, and you ask, Is this a spirit's tongue sounding on its way? so solitary and severe seems its harmony."

During this visit to Edinburgh, David Scott, the painter, whom Mr. Emerson describes as "a noble Stoic sitting apart here among his rainbow allegories," insisted on his sitting for his portrait. This picture was bought, after Mr. Emerson's death, by near friends, who considered the expression and attitude to be characteristic of him when lecturing, and was given to the Concord Public Library. Its somewhat hard drawing and coloring is offset in a measure by the insight of the painter, in placing the rainbow behind the figure of the apostle of hope.

In the Spring Mr. Emerson went to London and there stayed through March and April, seeing many interesting and notable people and receiving much friendly hospitality, of which much is told by Mr. Ireland in his book, and in Mr. Emerson's own letters home included in Mr. Cabot's Memoir. This was the stormy period of Chartist demonstrations in England, and of actual revolution in France. Though warned of possible danger, Mr. Emerson crossed the Channel and spent most of May in Paris, then in full ferment, with his friend Arthur Hugh Clough, a fellow of Oxford and author of The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich and other poems. He returned to London and gave, at the Portman Square Literary and Scientific Institute, a course of six lectures. Mr. Ireland speaks of the audience as "the élite of the social and literary world of the Metropolis. Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle, the Duchess of Sutherland, Lady Byron and her daughter Ada (Lady Lovelace),

the Duke of Argyll, Dr. John Carlyle, William and Mary Howitt, Douglas Jerrold, Mr. John Forster, Thackeray and many other distinguished persons were among his hearers. … During the delivery of this course a letter appeared in the London Examiner urging a repetition of it at a price sufficiently low to admit of poor literary men hearing Emerson." The writer of this letter, on behalf of "poets, critics, philosophers, historians, scholars, and the other divine paupers of that class," urged that this be done "because Emerson is a phenomenon whose like is not in the world, and to miss him is to lose an important part out of the nineteenth century." Mr. Emerson met this demand. He wrote home, "I must make amends for my aristocratic lecturing in Edwards St. at prices which exclude all my public by reading three of my old chapters in Exeter Hall to a city association." This done, he gladly sailed for home in July.

"I leave England," he wrote to Miss Margaret Fuller, "with an increased respect for the Englishman. His stuff or substance seems to be the best of the world. I forgive him his pride. My respect is the more generous that I have no sympathy with him, only an admiration."

This was no doubt a true and concise statement of his feeling about the race of modern Englishmen as he met them. He admired their comeliness and strength, as fine animals, their executive ability and prowess at home and abroad; he had experienced their open hospitality. Above all, he respected their honesty and their courage, physical and moral—but he found few idealists. The remarkable honor and esteem in which he held the English has another reason. He had been from childhood their debtor. When he thought of the English it was the English from Alfred's time onward. In books he had found his friends and his delight, and there

were almost no American books. In the nursery he began with Miss Edgeworth and Bunyan, went on to Shakspeare, Milton, and Spenser, knew Homer through Chapman and Pope, owed Montaigne to Cotton's racy English; Scott and Byron had carried him into realms of romance; as a boy he had rejoiced in Berkeley's idealism, and the poems of the holy Herbert. Gibbon's majestic chapters and the eloquence of Burke had stirred him. Bacon and Newton aroused his admiration, Coleridge had enlightened him, and, last, in Wordsworth, Landor, and especially Carlyle he had found thought and stimulus and advancing courage.

The English authors represented England for him, and through them he knew of their men of action, whether Warwick or Drake, Strafford or Cromwell or Hastings.

After Mr. Emerson's return, while preparing Representative Men for the press, he was reading lectures on "England," "Anglo-Saxon," "Norseman and English Influence on Modern Civilization," "English Poetry," "France or Urbanity," "The Anglo-American," and thus gradually brought his new material into shape for publication in English Traits.

The book appeared in 1856. Carlyle thus welcomed it: "I got your Book by post in the Highlands; and had such a day over it as falls rarely to my lot! Not for seven years and more have I got hold of such a Book;—Book by a real man, with eyes in his head; nobleness, wisdom, humor, and many other things in the heart of him. Such Books do not turn up often in the decade, in the century. In fact I believe it to be worth all the Books ever written by New England upon Old. Franklin might have written such a thing (in his own way); no other since! We do very well with it here, and the wise part of us best."

I. FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND

Page 3, note 1. Mr. Wall, a young artist of New Bedford, with whom he had crossed the Simplon from Italy. The copy of Michael Angelo's Fates, which always hung in Mr. Emerson's study, was painted by Mr. Wall.

Page 4, note 1. Scott and Mackintosh had died in the previous year, and apparently not until his visit in 1847 did he meet Jeffrey, De Quincey, or Hallam. In the letters quoted in Mr. Cabot's Memoir of Emerson, the interesting account of his meeting with the first two is given. De Quincey, then over sixty years of age, "with a very handsome face, … a very gentle old man speaking with the greatest deliberation and softness, and so refined in speech and manners as to make one quite indifferent to his extremely plain and poor dress," came, wet through and muddy, having walked ten miles in the storm, to dine with Mr. Emerson at the invitation of Mrs. Crowe. He later invited Mr. Emerson to dine with him and his daughters, and attended his lecture.

Page 4, note 2. William Wilberforce, the friend and helper of Pitt, a member of Parliament from Hull. He introduced the bill for the abolition of the slave trade, and for years championed the measure against the planters and merchants until its final success.

Page 5, note 1. Horatio Greenough was born in Boston in 1805. His fine personality and his high thought interested Mr. Emerson when they met in Italy and through the sculptor's short life. He made the statue of Washington in front of the National Capitol and many other good works of sculpture, and also designed Bunker Hill Monument.

Page 8, note 1. Pierre Charron (1514-1603), a French philosopher of note and a Roman Catholic theologian. He wrote the Traité des Trois Vérités and the Traité de la Sagesse. Mr. Emerson's journals in 1830 show that he had

been looking up the beliefs of Heracleitus, Xenophanes, Empedocles, and other ancient philosophers in De Gérando's Histoire Comparée des Systèmes de Philosophie. Richard Lucas, D. D. (1648-1715), wrote "Enquiry after Happiness" and "Practical Christianity, or an Account of the Holiness which the Gospel enjoins."

Page 8, note 2. A friend informs me that the following hexameters of Julius Caesar, the only specimen of his verse that we have, are found in an extract from the life of Terentius by Suetonius, preserved by Donatus in the introduction to his commentary on this poet. (Deperditorum Librorum Reliquiae.)

Tu quoque, tu in summis, o dimidiate Menander, Poneris, et merito, puri sermonis amator. Lenibus atque utinam scriptis adjuncta foret vis Comica, ut aequato virtus polleret honore Cum Graecis, neve hac despectus parte jaceres! Unum hoc maeror ac doleo tibi deesse, Terenti.

Thou also art placed, and rightly, among the highest, O halved Menander,1 1.2 lover of clear language, and oh that the comic gift had been added to thy graceful writing, so that thy power might be held in honor equal to the Greek, nor thou lie neglected on this account. This one thing I regret, and mourn thy lack in it, O Terence.

Page 10, note 1. It is fair to remember that fifty years ago there seemed small chance that an American book would find many readers in England, and also that the American public for whom it was written was a small number of persons, reverent

towards English writers. The book, however, reached Landor twenty-three years after the conversation reported, and he published a commentary entitled "An Open Letter from W. S. Landor to R. W. Emerson" (printed at Bath),1 1.3 some of the corrections in which of Mr. Emerson's statements it is proper to give below. The whole pamphlet is very entertaining in its radical and revolutionary vehemence, yet, considering the temper of the man, singularly respectful and friendly.

In a letter to Carlyle in 1841 Mr. Emerson spoke thus of his value of Landor:—

"Many years ago I have read a hundred fine memorable things in the Imaginary Conversations, though I knew well the faults of that book, and the Pericles and Aspasia within two years has given me delight. I was introduced to the Man in Florence … and his speech I remember was below his writing. I love the rich variety of his mind, his proud tastes, his penetrating glances, and the poetic loftiness of his sentiment, which rises now and then to the meridian, though with the flight, I own, rather of the rocket than an orb, and terminates sometimes by a sudden tumble."

In the following extracts are the more important corrections and comments which Landor made on Mr. Emerson's report, in the "Open Letter":—

MY DEAR SIR:—

Your English Traits have given me great pleasure; and they would have done so, even if I had been treated by you with less favour. The short conversations we held at

my Tuscan Villa were insufficient for an estimate of my character and opinions. A few of these and only a few, of the least important, I may have modified since. Let me run briefly over them as I find them stated in your pages. Twenty-three years have not obliterated from my memory the traces of your visit, in company with that intelligent man and glorious sculptor, who was delegated to erect a statue in your capitol to the tutelary genius of America.

Speaking of Michael Angelo, he says,—

"I confess I have no relish for his prodigious giblet pie in the Capella Sistina, known throughout the world as his Last Judgment. Grand in architecture, he was no ordinary poet, no lukewarm patriot."

He says of Raffaelle, "The cartoons are his noblest works: they place him as high as is Correggio in the dome of Parma: nothing has been, or is likely to be, higher. … Let me say, before we go father, that I do not think 'the Greek historians the only good ones.'"

He then praises Davila, Machiavelli, Voltaire, Michelet, Gibbon, Napier.

"Is it certain that I am indiscriminating in my judgment on Charron? Never have I compared him with Montaigne; but there is much of wisdom, and, what is remarkable in the earlier French authors, much of sincerity in him.

"I am sorry to have 'pestered you with Southey,' and to have excited the enquiry, 'Who is Southey?' I will answer the question. Southey is the poet who has written the most imaginative poem of any in our own times, English or Continental; such is the Curse of Kehama. Southey is the proseman who has written the purest prose; Southey is the critic, is the most cordial and the least invidious. Show me another

of any note, without captiousness, without arrogance and without malignity.

'Slow rises worth by poverty depressed.'

But Southey raised it."

Speaking of his early poem "Gebir," he says that in an English journal "on the strength of this poem I am compared and preferred to Göthe. I am not too much elated. Neither in my youthful days, nor in any other have I thrown upon the world such trash as 'Werther' and 'Wilhelm Meister,' nor flavored my poetry with the corrugated spicery of metaphysics. Nor could he have written in a lifetime any twenty, in a hundred or thereabout, of my Imaginary Conversations. My poetry I throw to the Scotch terriers growling at my feet. Fifty pages of Shelley contain more of pure poetry than a hundred of Göthe.

"I do not 'undervalue Socrates.' Being the cleverest of the Sophists, he turned the fraternity into ridicule: he eluded the grasp of his antagonist by anointing with the oil of quibble all that was tangible and prominent. To compare his philosophy (if indeed you can catch it) with the philosophy of Epicurus and Epictetus, whose systems meet, is insanity.

"I do not 'despise entomology.' I am ignorant of it; as indeed of almost all science.

"I love also flowers and plants; but I know less about them than is known by a beetle or a butterfly.

"I must have been misunderstood, or have been culpably inattentive, if I said, 'I knew not Herschell [sic] by name.' The father's I knew well, from his giving to a star the baptismal one of that pernicious madman who tore America from England."

Mr. Emerson published in the Dial in 1841 a paper on Landor which is now included in the volume Natural History of Intellect.

Page 10, note 2. In his chapter on "Boston" in Natural History of Intellect Mr. Emerson says that amid the laborious and economical population of New England you may often find "that refinement which no education and no habit of society can bestow; … which unites itself by natural affinity to the highest minds of the world; … and … gave a hospitality in this country to the spirit of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and to the music of Beethoven, before yet their genius had found a hearty welcome in Great Britain." There is evidence that at the age of twenty-three Mr. Emerson had been interested in Coleridge, and by him in German thought. In 1829, in a letter to his Aunt Mary Emerson, he speaks of his pleasure in Coleridge's "Friend" and says, "He has a tone a little lower than greatness, but what a living soul, what a universal knowledge!" and speaks of him as one "whose philosophy compares with others much as astronomy with the other sciences; taking post at the centre, and, as from a specular mount, sending sovereign glances to the circumference of things."1 2.1

John Sterling in a letter to Emerson in 1841,2 2.2 says: "In my boyhood, twenty years ago, I well remember that, with quite insignificant exceptions, all the active and daring minds which would not take for granted the Thirty-nine Articles and the Quarterly Review took refuge with teachers like Mackintosh and Jeffrey, or at highest Madame de Staël. Wordsworth and Coleridge were mystagogues lurking in

caverns, and German literature was thought of with a good deal less favour than we are now disposed to show towards that of China."

In the last lecture of the course on English Literature given in the winter of 1835-36 before the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, Mr. Emerson said that Coleridge's true merit was not that of a philosopher or of a poet, but of a critic. He praised his "subtlety of discrimination, surpassing all men in the fineness of his distinctions," and added, "He has taken the widest survey of the moral, intellectual, and social world. His Biographia Literaria is the best book of criticism in the English language; nay, I do not know any to which a modern scholar can be so much indebted. His works are of very unequal interest."

Page 10, note 3. Daniel Waterland, arch-deacon of Middlesex early in the eighteenth century, published polemical treatises against Arians and Deists.

Page 14, note 1. Mr. Emerson said to Mr. Ireland of Wordsworth and Carlyle: "Am I, who have hung over their works in my chamber at home, not to see these men in the flesh, and thank them and interchange some thoughts with them, when I am passing their very doors?"

Page 15, note 1. From Mr. Emerson's notebook:—

CARLISLE IN CUMBERLAND, AUG. 26 (1853).

I am just arrived in merry Carlisle from Dumfries. A white day in my years. I found the youth I sought in Scotland, and good and wise and pleasant he seems to me. Thomas Carlyle lives in the parish of Dunscore, sixteen miles from Dumfries, amid wild and desolate heathery hills and without a single companion in this region out of his own house. There he has his wife, a most accomplished and agreeable woman. Truth and peace and faith dwell with them and beautify

them. I never saw more amiableness than is in his countenance. He speaks broad Scotch with evident relish—'in London yonder;' I liked well 'about it,' 'Ay, Ay,' etc. Nothing can be better than his stories,—the philosophic phrase, etc.

Page 15, note 2. Mr. John Albee in his Remembrances speaks of Mr. Emerson's remarks on the daguerreotype of Carlyle (profile) which he showed him. "He spoke of his physiognomy, his heavy eyebrows and projecting base of the forehead, underset by the heavy lower jaw and lip, between which as millstones, he said, every humbug was sure to be pulverized."

Page 16, note 1. "Tunc uno quoque hinc inde instante, ut quam primum se impendentibus contumeliis eriperet, scrobem coram fieri imperavit, dimensus ad corporis sui modulum, componique simul, is qua invenirentur, frusta marmoris, et aquam simul et ligna conferri curando mox cadaveri, fiens ad singula atqui identidem dictitans;—Qualis artifex pereo!"—Suetonius, De Vita Caesarum, Liber VI., 49.

Which passage may be thus rendered: "Then with some one on each side urging him to save himself as soon as possible from the impending indignities, he commanded that a grave be made, in his presence, to his measure, and bits of marble, if any could be there found, be put together, and also water and wood to be brought for the disposing of the corpse soon to be, weeping at everything that was done and repeatedly exclaiming, 'What an artificer dies in me.'"

Page 18, note 1. Of this visit, from a man then totally unknown, to him "the solitariest, stranded, most helpless creature that I have been for many years," his work rejected by publishers, and apparently by the world, Carlyle wrote two years afterwards: "Long shall we remember that Autumn

Sunday that landed him (out of Infinite Space) on the Craigenputtock wilderness, not to leave us as he found us." And Mrs. Carlyle wrote: "Friend, who, years ago, in the Desert descended upon us out of the clouds, as it were, and made one day there look like enchantment or us, and left me weeping that it was only one day."

Page 19, note 1. "John S[tuart] Mill, the best mind he knows,—more purity, more force; has worked himself clear of Benthamism."—Journal.

Page 21, note 1. Mr. Landor in the "Open Letter" rudely comments on this preference, "More fool he!"

Page 23, note 1. Literally, a gain forever.

Page 24, note 1. In a letter to Mr. Ireland, Mr. Emerson thus spoke of this visit to Ambleside: "I spent a valuable hour, and perhaps a half more, with Mr. Wordsworth, who is in sound health at seventy-seven years and was full of talk. He would even have walked with me on my way to Miss Martineau's, but it began to rain, and I would not suffer it."

But he felt of Wordsworth and the lights of Edinburgh, as he said in another of his letters: "They have nothing half so good to give you near, as they had at a distance."

Miss Martineau had written of Mr. Emerson as she saw him in America in 1836: "There is a remarkable man in the United States, without knowing whom it is not too much to say that the United States cannot be fully known. I mean by this, not only that he has powers and worth which constitute him an element in the estimate which is to be formed of his country, but that his intellect and his character are the opposite of those which the influences of his country and his time are supposed almost necessarily to form. Great things are expected of him."

II. VOYAGE TO ENGLAND

Page 26, note 1. In answering Mr. Ireland's kindly

urged proposal, Mr. Emerson had said: "I feel no call to make a visit of literary propagandism in England. All my impulses of that kind would rather emplóy me at home." Yet he felt that the stimulus would be good for him, and writing later to Carlyle, whom he wished to see again, said: "I should find my account in the strong inducement of a new audience to finish pieces which have lain waiting with little hope for months and years. Ah then, if I dared, I should be glad to add some golden hours to my life in seeing you, now all full-grown and acknowledged amidst your own people,—to hear and speak is so little, yet so much."

Page 31, note 1. The voyage in a small coaster to Charleston and St. Augustine, which threatenings in his lungs obliged him to take in the winter of 1827.

III. LAND

Page 34, note 1. Count Vittorio Alfieri of Asti in Piedmont (1749-1803), an author of note, and especially a tragic dramatist.

Page 35, note 1. In his lecture "Boston" (printed in Natural History of Intellect) he says that those Englishmen who planted New England "were precisely the idealists of England," and Mr. Lowell in the Ode which he recited at the Old North Bridge on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Concord Fight, thus stated the issue:—

"Here English law and English thought Against the might of England fought."

Page 36, note 1. This was William Chambers of Edinburgh.

Page 37, note 1. At that time the eager American students of philosophy and theology were going to Göttingen, Jena, and Leipsic, while the young doctors and scientific students flocked to the Sorbonne and the hospitals of Paris.

Page 37, note 2. Add South Carolina, and you have more than an equivalent for the area of Scotland.—Mr. Emerson's note in First Edition.

Page 39, note 1. Mr. Emerson had full knowledge of the dismal conditions of life described, for he spent his first two months in lecturing and visiting in "The Black Country."

Page 41, note 1. "Et penitus, toto divisos orbe Britannos. (And within it [the ocean], the Britons, cut off from all the world.")—Virgil, AEneid I., 67.

Page 43, note 1.

"Thank Him who isled us here, and roughly set His Briton in blown seas and storming showers."

Tennyson's "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington."

Mr. Emerson wrote that an Englishman said to the Persian Ambassador in London, "I am told that in your country you worship the sun." "So would you, if you ever saw him," replied the Persian.

Page 44, note 1. The Races, A Fragment, by Robert Knox, M. D., London, 1850; republished in fuller form in 1862: The Races of Men, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations.

IV. RACE

Page 44, note 2. Charles Pickering, naturalist to the exploring expedition sent out by the United States in 1838, under Commodore Wilkes; author of Races of Man and works on the geographical distribution of animals and plants.

Page 48, note 1. Mr. Emerson had read Lyell and heard of Lamarck's teachings through him and others, and on his second visit to England had taken great interest in the conversation of the men of science.

That the imperative needs brought about by emigration, or other radical change of conditions, wrought variations in species, was the argument brought up by Lamarck against those who

pointed to Egyptian sculpture as showing the absolute persistence of race-type in men and animals. The conditions in Egypt, being constant, did not provoke variation.

Page 49, note 1. J. R. Green, in his Short History of the English People, says that even in the reign of Richard II. strikes and combinations became frequent among the lower craftsmen in the towns.

Page 49, note 2.

Roomy Eternity Casts her schemes rarely, And an aeon allows For each quality and part Of the multitudinous And many-chambered heart. "Fragments on Life," Poems, Appendix.

Mr. Emerson took great interest in his pear orchard, which he set out soon after settling in Concord, and every morning in good weather, before going to his study, visited, to prune, watch for caterpillars and borers, or gather the fruit. He had Downing's book on Fruits. A few pages in this gave him especial pleasure; namely, the account of the theory and successful experiments in the amelioration of fruits, by Dr. Van Mons, professor at Louvain in the Netherlands. All through Mr. Emerson's works crop out allusions to this hopeful theory of Amelioration, to him symbolic.

This theory, full of parables, might be thus stated in very condensed form:—

The aim of nature in the wild fruit-tree is only to produce a vigorous tree, and perfect seeds for continuing the species.

The object of culture is to subdue excess of vegetation, lessen coarseness of tree, reduce size of seeds, and increase the pulp of the fruit.

There is always a tendency of improved fruits to return by seeds to the wild state, especially in seeds borne by old fruit-trees, yet they never quite return.

But the seeds of a young tree of a good sort, being itself in a state of amelioration, have the least tendency to retrograde, and are most likely to produce improved sorts.

There is a limit to perfection in fruits. When this is reached, the next generation will more probably produce bad fruit than if raised from seeds of an indifferent sort in the course of amelioration. Seeds of the oldest good fruits usually produce inferior sorts; those from recent varieties of bad fruit, if reproduced uninterruptedly under good conditions for several generations, will certainly yield good fruit.

Van Mons was constantly on the watch for trees in a state of variation for his experiments. In the fifth generation his seedlings mostly gave excellent fruit and bore in the third year.

In 1823 Van Mons's nurseries contained two thousand seedlings of merit.

To his teachings and work should be credited a share in strengthening Mr. Emerson's faith in Compensation and in Ascension.

Page 50, note 1. "La Nature aime les croisements" is a quotation appearing in the journals.

Page 53, note 1. In spite of his praise for Plato, argument was not only disagreeable to Mr. Emerson, but he felt that the heat engendered burned up the perception. "Truth ceases to be truth when polemically stated," he said.

Page 55, note 1. In his boyhood Mr. Emerson delighted in Ossian and later in the genuine remains of the British bards, Taliessin, Llewarch Hen, and the others. We are apt to think and speak of the Scotch as one people, but the difference is striking between the religion of the Saxon Lowlander, fanatically

wedded to his Kirk's dour dogma, and delighting in argumentative theology, and the Celtic Highlander's faith in Spirit, associated with wild, free Nature and almost ancestor-worship.

Page 55, note 2. "It was in the consulship of Caecilius Metellus and Papirius Carbo, six hundred and forty years after the founding of Rome, that we first heard the clash of the Cimbrian arms. From that date, reckoning down to the second consulship of the Emperor Trajan, gives an interval of some two hundred and ten years. Our conquest of Germany is taking us a long time.

"And during the process we have had many hard blows in return. Not the Samnites, nor the Carthaginians, nor the Spaniards, nor the Gauls, nor even the Parthians themselves, have oftener given us a lesson. The freemen of Germany are more spirited antagonists than all the subjects of King Arsaces."1 3.1

Tacitus then enumerates the disastrous defeats of Roman armies in Germany, ending with the crushing blow when Varus lost three legions, and thus ends: "Nec impune Caius Marius in Italia, divus Julius in Gallia, Drusus ac Nero et Germanicus in suis eos sedibus perculerunt."

Page 56, note 1.

The gale that wrecked you on the sand, It helped my rowers to row; The storm is my best galley-hand And drives me where I go. "Northman," Quatrains, Poems.

Page 57, note 1. Heimskringla, or The Sea-Kings of

Norway, translated and edited by Samuel Laing. London, 1844.

Page 60, note 1. This story, one of those which Mr. Emerson liked to read to his children, is in Laing's Sea-Kings of Norway, above mentioned.

Page 61, note 1. Throughout English Traits it appears that Mr. Emerson had been carried along in the tide of historical reaction that set in in the first half of the century. The merits of the Anglo-Saxon then shone out after long eclipse by Norman glory,—much as "Cromwell damned to ever-lasting fame" was established as the hero of England by Carlyle. The tendency of many books of that day showed a democratic recoil from aristocratic feudalism, and withal the dislike of France by English writers told to the disadvantage of the vikings who had really been much civilized by French residence. So, as was natural, the pendulum of opinion for the time went to the Saxon extreme. Yet with regard to the Saxon conquest of Britain, Tennyson's picture—

"Last, a heathen horde, Reddening the sky with fire and earth with blood, And on the spear which pierced the mother's heart Spitting the babe, brake over sea"—

is borne out by Freeman and Green in their histories, and the Norman Conquest was gentle and beneficent beside that of the exterminating Saxon. Freeman writes: "The English wiped out everything Celtic and everything Roman. … A more fearful blow never fell on any nation than the landing of the Angles and Saxons was to the Celt of Britain. But we may now be thankful for the barbarism and ferocity of our forefathers."

Of the Norseman settled on the Seine he says: "The

Scandinavians in Gaul embraced the creed, the language and the manners of their French neighbors, without losing a whit of their old Scandinavian vigor and love of adventure. The people thus formed became the foremost apostles alike of French Chivalry and Latin Christianity. … To free England he (the Norman) gave a line of tyrants. … But to England he gave also a conquering nobility which in a few years became as truly English in England, as it had become French in Normandy. … In a word, the indomitable vigor of the Scandinavian, joined to the buoyant vivacity of the Gaul, produced the conquering and ruling race of Europe. And yet that race, as a race, has vanished. It has everywhere been absorbed by the races which it has conquered."

Page 62, note 1. In one of the lectures on England Mr. Emerson said: "Then came the Gothic nations, Belgian, Saxon, Dane, Northman. The Emperor Charles V. said that 'all the nobility of Europe came out of Scandia and from the stock of the Goths.'"

Page 64, note 1. Sir Samuel Romilly (1757-1818), of Huguenot descent, was solicitor-general under the Grenville administration in 1806. In Parliament he bravely advocated political reform, abolition of the slave trade, Catholic emancipation, and mitigation of the criminal code. The success of the last measure did not come until after his death by his own hand while suffering from melancholia.

Page 64, note 2. Charles Reade's story, It is Never too Late to Mend, was an important tract in arousing public attention in England to these outrages. It may be interesting to mention that one of Mr. Emerson's friends and neighbors, John S. Keyes, sheriff of Middlesex, was greatly moved by this book, and gave copies of it to the officers of the county jail at East Cambridge.

Page 70, note 1. I think this phrase was Lord Palmerston's, when asked how he could carry the load of care and labor that rested on him when he was Premier: "By putting a solid bar of eight hours' sleep between day and day."

Page 72, note 1. In the Achievements of Cavalry by General Sir Evelyn Wood, V. C., G. C. B., etc., in which six brilliant actions of cavalry in Europe in the last hundred years are selected, two are credited to the English service: 1st, at Villars en Couchées in Brittany in 1793, the breaking of a square of French infantry protected by artillery and cavalry by the Fifteenth Light Dragoons; 2d, at Garcia Hernandez in the Peninsular War, where five "British" squadrons (but Hanoverians, of the King's German Legion) attacked the rear guard of a French division, broke two squares, and captured a general and one thousand prisoners. The French commander praised the gallantry of their action in the highest terms, and the Duke of Wellington said he had never seen so gallant a charge.

The English cavalry certainly distinguished themselves at the end of the day at Waterloo, and at Balaclava in the Crimea the superb courage and steadiness of Scarlett's Heavy Brigade in the morning, and the unquestioning gallantry of the hopeless charge of the Light Brigade under Lord Cardigan in the afternoon, demonstrated the individual prowess and admirable discipline of the British cavalryman, even when ill managed.

V. ABILITY

Page 76, note 1. Of George Stephenson, the introducer of the locomotive engine for railway use, and Chief Engineer of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, Mr. Emerson writes in his journal: "At Chesterfield I dined in company with Stephenson, the old engineer, who built the first locomotive, and who is, in every way, one of the most remarkable men I have seen in England. I do not know but that I shall

accept some day his reiterated invitation to 'go to his house and stay a few days and see Chatsworth and other things.'" His son, Robert Stephenson, was exactly Mr. Emerson's age. The tubular bridge over the Menai Straits was among his great engineering works.

Isambard Brunel, son of the constructor of the Thames tunnel, took part in floating and raising the Conway and Britannia tubular bridges.

Page 77, note 1. Henry de Bratton, or Bracton, in the thirteenth century, and ecclesiastic and jurist, and Chancellor of the Exchequer, wrote De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, which is said to be "the first attempt to treat the whole extent of the English Law in a manner at once systematic and practical."

William Camden (1551-1623), the historian and antiquary, author of Britannia and of the Annals of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth. The Camden Society, for publication of valuable literary and antiquarian matter, takes its name from him.

Sir William Dugdale (1605-86), antiquarian and historian of extraordinary industry, to whom credit is due for his preservation of a vast amount of valuable and interesting records of the past legal, ecclesiastic, genealogical, artistic and heraldic.

John Selden (1584-1654), jurist, antiquarian, orientalist and author.

James Brindley (1716-72), a remarkable engineer who united the rivers of England—Mersey, Trent, Humber, Thames and Severn—by canals, and tunnelled Harecastle Hill.

Josiah Wedgwood (1730-95), whose studies of the antique "raised British pottery to the level of a fine art."

Page 79, note 1. Antony à Wood's Athenae Oxoniensis.

Carlyle presented these two fine folio volumes to Emerson in 1848.

Page 79, note 2. Man's Soule, p. 29.

Page 82, note 1. Philip de Comines (1445-1509), whose abilities, and residence near Burgundy, necessarily deeply involved him in the political struggles between its duke and the king of France, each of whom he served in turn. His Memoirs are an important authority on the period, and to them is due much of the knowledge of the character of Louis XI. (portrayed by Sir Walter Scott in Quentin Durward).

Page 83, note 1. Mr. Emerson's friend, Professor Charles Eliot Norton, tells the story of an occurrence during their homeward voyage together from England in 1873. They were in the middle of the Atlantic, and in their talk the daring of Columbus was spoken of in his sailing on westward, week after week, without sight of land. Mr. Emerson said, "But Columbus had the compass. That was enough for a man of his quality." Then, producing from his pocket a small compass, he said, "I always carry this with me. I like to hold the god in my hand."

Page 85, note 1. In a lecture on the Anglo-American, contrasting the hurry and daring shiftiness of the Western pioneer with the cautious thoroughness of the Briton, Mr. Emerson said, "The engine is built in the boat, which does not commend it to the Englishman. The knees, instead of grand old oak, are sawed out of refuse sapling."

Page 86, note 1. John Clerk, a merchant of Eldin, near Edinburgh, wrote "An Essay on Naval Tactics" in 1790 (2d and 3d parts in 1797), which gave rise to a controversy due to the claim of Clerk, supported by others, that his plans, which had been circulated in manuscript before publication, had been adopted by Admiral Rodney at Dominica in April, 1782.

Page 87, note 1. In his History of the War in the Peninsula Napier says that "in the beginning of each war England has to seek in blood the knowledge necessary to insure success; and, like the fiend's progress towards Eden, her conquering course is through chaos followed by death."

Page 87, note 2. In his indignation at the cold and threatening attitude of aristocratic and official England towards our country in the first years of the Civil War, Mr. Emerson wrote thus: "England has no higher worship than Fate. … Never a lofty sentiment, never a Duty to Civilization, never a generosity, a moral self-restraint. In sight of a commodity, her religion, her morals are forgotten. Why need we be religious? Have I not bishops and clergy at home punctually praying, and sanctimonious from head to foot? Have they not been paid their last year's salary?"

Of course, in thus saying, he would have fully admitted what he said in his journal of 1849: "There are two or three Englands, and it is difficult to speak emphatically of England without finding that we are saying that which is true of only one of these—false of the others."

Page 89, note 1. In the Norse mythology of the Edda.

Page 90, note 1. Luke Hansard's Journal of the House of Commons from 1774.

Page 91, note 1. Sir Charles Fellowes on his travels discovered Xanthos, the capital of ancient Lycia, in 1838. His description of the remarkable architectural and sculptured remains there induced the British government to obtain permission for their excavation and removal to the British Museum. Mr. Emerson there saw with delight these treasures, under the guidance of Sir Charles Fellowes; especially the triumphal temple with the statues in honor of the twelve cities which sent aid to Harpagus in his reduction of Ionian cities. Mr. Emerson

calls the Greek sculpture in the Museum the "Illustration of Homer and Herodotus," and adds, "England holds these things for mankind, and holds them well. Conservative, she is Conservator."

Page 92, note 1. Of the race, sifted by conscience and endurance, building their New Commonwealth in New England, he said:—

The men of yore were stout and poor, And sailed for bread to every shore. And where they went on trade intent They did what freemen can, Their dauntless ways did all men praise, The merchant was a man. The world was made for honest trade,— To plant and eat be none afraid. "Boston," Poems.

Page 93, note 1. The Banshee in Irish legend was a familiar spirit of a household, whose cries prophesied their weal or woe.

Page 94, note 1. Pope's "Windsor Forest," quoted by Mr. Emerson from memory and differing slightly from the original lines.

Page 97, note 1. Mr. Emerson in a note to the earlier editions refers on this subject to the Memorial of Horatio Greenough (p. 66), published in New York in 1853.

Page 97, note 2. In the chapter on "Aristocracy" in this volume it is stated that the possessions of the Earl of Lonsdale gave him eight seats in Parliament and that "before the Reform of 1832 one hundred and fifty-four persons sent three hundred and seven members to Parliament. The borough-mongers governed England."

The Reform Bill, passed in June of that year (which by its

defeat the year before had occasioned terrible agitation throughout England, accompanied by riots), took away the right of representation from fifty-six "rotten boroughs," and gave the one hundred and forty-three members it gained to counties or large towns which as yet sent no members to Parliament.

Page 97, note 3. Mr. Emerson here noted that "Sir Samuel Romilly, purest of English patriots, decided that the only independent mode of entering Parliament was to buy a seat, and he bought Horsham." See a passage with regard to this action in the end of the chapter "Results" in this volume.

Page 97, note 4. John Scott, Earl of Eldon (1751-1838), the distinguished jurist, and Lord Chancellor of England for twenty-eight years. He was a stanch Tory and earnestly opposed Catholic emancipation and Parliamentary reform and all liberal measures.

Page 98, note 1. Mr. Emerson used to read to his children for its pathetic eloquence a passage in which Coleridge related the words of an old shepherd on the recent cruel depopulation of the Highlands of Scotland by absentee chiefs and lairds. The old man, after describing the brave and self-respecting population of the strath in his youth, cries out, "And what is here now but a shepherd and an underling or two, and, it may be, a pair of small lads,—and a many, many sheep!" He tells of the laird who "raised a company to go to the battles overseas for the love that was borne to his name, and gained high preferment in consequence. And what were the thanks that the folks had for those that came back, some blind and more in danger of blindness, and for those that perished in the hospitals or fell in battle fighting before or beside him? Why, that their fathers were all turned out of their farms before the year was over, or sent to wander like so many gypsies, unless they would consent to shed their

gray hairs at ten-pence a day over the new canals! Had there been a price set on his head, he needed but have whistled and a hundred brave lads would have made a wall of flame around him with the flash of their broad-swords. Now, if the French should come among us, let him whistle to his sheep and see if they will fight for him!"

Page 100, note 1. Adam Gottlieb Oehlenschlāger, for the reason given in the text, went to Germany and there became eminent as a writer of tragedies. He later went to Paris. Hakon Jarl, Correggio, and Land Lost and Found are among his pieces, the last based on the Norsemen's discovery of America.

Page 100, note 2. James Hutton, a man of wide education and of versatile gifts, turned his attention to geology, and wrote a Theory of the Earth, assuming that heat was the main agent in its changes.

VI. MANNERS

Page 108, note 1. The devoted wife of Colonel John Hutchinson, one of the Parliamentary leaders in the civil war, and member of the high court of judiciary which condemned Charles I. to death. After the Restoration he was accused of conspiracy and died in prison. His wife wrote his Memoir, which was first published in 1806.

Lady Rachel Russell, daughter of the Earl of Southampton. Her husband, William Lord Russell, sentenced on a false charge of conspiracy against Charles II., was beheaded. His wife helped him during his defence, in which he was not allowed counsel.

Page 111, note 1. Contrast with this picture of the handsome but case-hardened beings whom he met, that which he drew, using the same image, of the advancing soul. "Every soul is by this intrinsic necessity quitting its whole system of things and home and laws and faith, as the shell-fish crawls

out of its beautiful but stony case, because it no longer admits of its growth, and slowly forms a new house." ("Compensation," Essays, First Series.)

The description in the text of the hard enamel, varnishing the Englishman, is, in Mr. Emerson's journal, followed by his adducing Pope, Swift, Johnson, Gibbon, Goldsmith and Gray, as instances. He goes on: "We get good men sometimes in this country; but Everett and Irving are the only persons I think of who have pretensions to finish, and their enamel will not rival the British. It seems an indemnity to the Briton for his precocious maturity. He has no generous daring in this age; the Platonism died in the Elizabethan; he is shut up in French limits; the practical, the comfortable oppress him with inexorable claims, so that the smallest fraction of power remains for poetry. But Birmingham comes in, and says, 'Never mind; I have some patent lustre that defies criticism!' and Moore made his whole fabric of the 'lustre,' and Tennyson supplied defects with it. Only Wordsworth bought none."

Page 113, note 1. From A Relation, or rather a True Account of the Island of England, by a Venetian Traveller (about A. D. 1500). Printed by the Camden Society, no. xxxvii. 1847.

Page 113, note 2. Mr. Emerson made this a household word, telling his children when unusually late to a meal, "Nothing but death or mutilation will hold as an excuse."

VII. TRUTH

Page 116, note 1. Mr. Joshua Bates, the American member of the firm of Messrs. Baring Brothers of London, said to Mr. Emerson, "I have been here thirty years and nobody has ever attempted to cheat me."

Page 117, note 1. The above passage recalls some "Pythagorean opinions," copied by Mr. Emerson in the "Blotting

Book" of 1830, in which he took pleasure because they recognized the "Universal Mind" even in animals.

"Man has some affinity, not only with gods, but with animals; one mind runs through the universe. The soul breathes the representations of the images of things as a sort of air."

Page 118, note 1. A good instance of the Englishman's caution in "checking himself in compliments" is in the introduction to his audience of a lecturer by the presiding clergyman or squire, who takes pleasure "in calling your attention to the—er—doubtless very interesting remarks we are about to hear," etc.

Page 119, note 1. The Worthies of England, by Thomas Fuller (1608-61).

Page 120, note 1.

"Truth-teller was our England's Alfred named; Truth-lover was our English duke; Whatever record leap to light, He never shall be shamed."

Tennyson's "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington."

Page 120, note 2.

"Round affrighted Lisbon drew The treble works, the vast designs Of his labored rampart-lines: Where he greatly stood at bay, Whence he issued forth anew, And ever great and greater grew, Beating from the wasted vines Back to France her banded swarms,

Till o'er the hills her eagles flew." Tennyson's "Ode."

Page 122, note 1. A notable instance is that of George Stephenson, the great engineer, who, beginning life as a fireman in a colliery, and unable to read at eighteen, rose by his extraordinary achievements to wealth and consideration, but declined the offer of knighthood.

Page 123, note 1. Wellington, then Lieutenant-General Wellesley, in command of the first expedition to Portugal, had landed his forces, August 1, 1808, and soon after defeated Laborde and repulsed Junot. Sir Hugh Dalrymple, the English commissioner, made an agreement with the latter in a convention at Cintra by which the French were not only permitted to leave Portugal, but were conveyed to France with their arms and property.

Page 123, note 2. Lord Eldon's stanch Tory opposition to all reforms was not pursued in ignorance of the increasing unpopularity of his course; for Mr. Emerson notes that he said in his old age that, "were he to begin life again, he would be damned but he would begin as an agitator."

Page 123, note 3. Mr. Emerson made the following note in modification of the above passage, written several years before the book was published:—

"It is an unlucky moment to remember these sparkles of solitary virtue in the face of the honors lately paid in England to the Emperor Louis Napoleon. I am sure that no Englishman that I had the happiness to know, consented, when the aristocracy and the commons of London cringed like a Neapolitan rabble, before a successful thief. But,—how to resist one step, though odious, in a linked series of state necessities? Governments must always learn too late that the use of dishonest agents is as ruinous for nations as for single men."

Page 124, note 1. The "spiritual" manifestations that began to attract attention in America about the year 1850

were first called "Rochester knockings" because they occurred in the family of John D. Fox of that city.

Page 126, note 1. From Daniel Defoe's True-Born Englishman, Part II.

Tacitus writes of the ancient Germans: "It is generally at their drinking-bouts that they discuss" all important matters of a public or private nature. "Not being a crafty or a cunning race, they furthermore disclose their secret thoughts in the freedom of the feast, and so the minds of all lie open and discovered. On the morrow the matter is debated again and the double process justifies itself. They discuss when disguise is impossible, they decide when too sober to blunder." (Germania, XXII.)

VIII. CHARACTER

Page 128, note 1. Jehan Froissart, Canon of Chimay in Flanders (1337-1410), in his Chroniques de France, d' Angleterre, d' Ecosse, d' Espagne, de Bretagne, de Gascogne, Flandres et lieux d' alentour. Mr. Emerson used often to quote the remark of Grahame of Claverhouse to his prisoner, Morton, in Scott's Old Mortality, about the glorious old chronicler of chivalry: "I have half a mind to contrive you should have six months' imprisonment in order to procure you that pleasure. His chapters inspire me with more enthusiasm than even poetry itself."

Page 131, note 1. Shakspeare, Henry IV., Part II., Act I., Scene 1.

Page 135, note 1. Milton, L' Allegro.

Page 135, note 2. It is of course Turner that is here referred to. In his journal Mr. Emerson tells of going with Mr. Stanfield, the painter, and another gentleman, to see Mr. Windus's large collection of Turner's pictures and drawings at Tottenham. Later Mr. Richard Owen, the anatomist, "carried us to Turner's studio, but Turner, though he had written

him a note to announce his visit, was gone. So he [Owen] showed us the pictures. In his earlier pictures, he said, Turner painted conventionally, painted what he knew was there, finished the coat and buttons; in the later he paints only what the eye really sees, and gives the genius of the city or landscape. He was engaged to paint a whale-ship, and he came one day to see Mr. Owen and asked to see a mullet (?) [Agassiz said a Clio]1 3.2 and begged him to explain to him from the beginning the natural history of the creature; which he did; Turner followed him with great accuracy. In process of time the picture was painted and Owen went there to see his mullet. 'I could not find it,' he said, 'in the picture, but I doubt not it is all there.'"

The painter out of kindness to whom he smudged his own picture with water-color was Lawrence.

Mr. Emerson notes, "Turner told Stanfield he will not suffer any portrait to be taken of him, for nobody would ever believe that such an ugly fellow made such beautiful things."

Page 135, note 3.

"But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve For daws to peck at." Shakspeare, Othello, Act I., Scene 1.

Page 139, note 1. Fuller's Worthies of England.

Page 140, note 1. Heimskringla, Laing's translation, vol. iii. p. 37.

IX. COCKAYNE

Page 144, note 1. "Humorist" in the Elizabethan sense of indulging his humor or whim. In his notes on England

Mr. Emerson quotes from Dr. A. Carlyle's Autobiography: "The humorist prevails more in England than in any country because liberty has long been universal there and wealth very general, which I hold to be the father and mother of the humorist."

Page 144, note 2. In 1844 Mr. R. H. Gurney, a banker of Norwich, said on his cross-examination before a railway committee, "I have never travelled by rails. I am an enemy to them. I have opposed the Norwich Railway. I have left a sum of money in my will to oppose railroads."

Page 145, note 1. Mr. Emerson in a lecture called "France; or, Urbanity," delivered soon after his return from this visit abroad, and often in his allusion to the French, shows something of the same tendency to "use France as a blackboard." It should be remembered that his experience of France was only in Paris, and mostly for a few weeks during the Revolution of 1848, a time which brought out the excitability of the French, a trait always disturbing to his serene mind.

Page 146, note 1. One brilliant exception to this rough British propagandism has been recently shown by Sir Andrew Clarke, whose wise humanity and consideration for the traditions and feelings of the fierce Malay race, with whom he had to deal, has been so successful in producing peace and prosperity, with almost no military backing, in the Straits Settlement.

Page 149, note 1. In some loose sheets of notes written in 1848 this plan is more fully stated.

"There is also this use to be made of brag, that men show their cards in that. Humor them by all means. Do not check the speaker by so much as a look; he is unconsciously telling you his idea of what he ought to do. Draw it all out, and

then hold him to it. Hold the Frenchman to his. He that is the liberator of the universe: he that has the most civilized of civilizations: France it is to which all nations sitting in darkness look with hope and all despots with despair. My best of human beings! I am delighted to hear you. And this is the mission of France. And France will suffer nobody nor any mad neighbour to do the like by Poland, Hungary or Turkey. Least of all to impede the liberty of the press or of speech in France. Take down the words, and give me your signature to this in black and white. Surely you do not hesitate!

"Well, but here are English, and I remember that the English say that the French are a little given—the least in the world—to rhodomontade—but that English speak what they think, and their word is as good as their bond. Well, these, then, we can hold to their boast: England is the refuge of freedom, English press is the public opinion of Europe, asylum of the oppressed, bulwark of freedom against the despotism. We will remember all this; and see how well her actions bear it out in the approaching crisis."

Page 150, note 1. William Spence, principally known by his work on entomology, written in conjunction with the Rev. William Kirby. He was for a time a member of Parliament.

Page 150, note 2. The general distress among the poorer classes in England continuing after the passage of the Reform Bill in 1832 led to agitation and even riots on behalf of "The People's Charter" in 1839. The "six points" of Chartism were: Universal suffrage, vote by ballot, annual Parliaments, equal electoral districts, no property qualification for members, and payment for their services. Most of these points have been substantially won. Some Chartist demonstrations were

broken up by the military arm of the government, and leading agitators imprisoned or transported. The last serious demonstrations were during the time of Mr. Emerson's stay in England, and gave rise to the more alarm because of the revolution then going on in France.

9 March, 1848. "I attended a Chartist Meeting in National Hall, Holburn. It was called to hear the report of the Deputation who had returned after carrying congratulations to the French Republic. The Marseillaise was sung by a party of men and women on the platform and chorused by the whole assembly: then the Girondins. The leaders appeared to be grave men intent on keeping a character for order and moral tone, but the great body of the meeting liked best the sentiment, 'Every man a ballot and every man a musket.'"

Mr. Emerson's comment is, "England a little top-heavy still, though she keeps her feet much better since the Corn-laws were thrown overboard."

Page 152, note 1. Mr. Emerson adopted the account of St. George given by Gibbon. The weight of evidence of the various chronicles now seems to show that the real St. George was not George the Arian, of Cappadocia, described in the text, but another who died two generations earlier.

It is said that Constantine the Great dedicated a church to the martyred St. George in Constantinople more than forty years before the killing of George the Arian, which occurred in A. D. 361. Eusebius relates that St. George, a man of no mean origin and highly esteemed for his temporal dignities, publicly tore down the edict against the Christians of the Emperor Diocletian, who was then in the city, and "after enduring what was likely to follow an act so daring, preserved his mind calm and serene until the moment his spirit fled."

Other authors tell of the prolonging of the tortures for ten days, the saint recovering and performing miracles in the intervals.

In the opinion of to-day the case of Amerigo Vespucci appears in a better light than that here presented. Although his statement that he was concerned in the voyage to the New World in 1497 is held to be false, he appears to have taken part in one or two expeditions which later reached the South American coast. A writer in the American Encyclopaedia says that it does not appear that Vespucci himself had any intention of taking the honor of the discovery from Columbus.

X. WEALTH

Page 153, note 1. Benjamin Robert Haydon, the painter and writer on art, whose life was a struggle with poverty, and who was himself imprisoned for debt. In his bitterness he wrote:—

"The greatest curse that can befall a father in England is to have a son gifted with a passion and a genius for high art." (Life of Haydon.)

Page 155, note 1. The misery in the streets of the English cities, especially of women and children, distressed Mr. Emerson. In a letter to his wife soon after arriving in Manchester he said, referring to his youngest daughter: "My dear little Edie, to tell you the truth, costs me many a penny, day by day. I cannot go up the street but I shall see some woman in rags, with a little creature just of Edie's size and age, but in coarsest ragged clothes, and barefooted, stepping beside her; and I look curiously into her Edie's face with some terror lest it should resemble mine, and the far-off Edie wins from me the half-pence for this near one." For more to this purpose, see Mr. Cabot's Memoir, vol. ii., pp. 506, 507.

Page 156, note 1. Lord Bacon in his essay On Expense gave the like counsel: "Certainly, if a man will keep but of

even hand, his ordinary expenses ought to be but half of his receipts; and, if he thinks to wax rich, but to the third part."

Page 161, note 1. In the Norse mythology, the Fenris wolf, son of Loki, was bound on Niflheim, but steadily frays his bond, which will at last break, and in the Day of Doom he will swallow the Sun.

Page 162, note 1. Mr. Emerson's residence and visitings in the great industrial towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire, where he met manufacturers and operatives at the mechanics' institutes before which he lectured, gave him remarkable opportunities to see the huge material activities and their products; also their social and economic results. Soon after landing he wrote that he had an invitation from a "Mr. Crawshay, who refused the tests at Cambridge after reading my essays! as he writes me. And so with small wisdom the world is moved as of old." He accepted, and soon after wrote: "I find here at Newcastle a most accomplished gentleman in Mr. Crawshay, at whose counting-room in his iron works I am now sitting after much conference on many and useful arts." It was his six-ton trip-hammer that suggested Thor's Miöllnir. Mr. Crawshay showed how it would fall close down to his silk hat and spare it, and then reduce a workman's borrowed hat to atoms.

Page 163, note 1. It will be remembered that John Evelyn, the well-known author of the Diary, wrote, at the instance of the Royal Society, when there was panic lest ship-timber should fail in England, his Sylva, or Forest Trees, which induced the planting of oaks that furnished the ship-yards of the next century.

Passing over the two poet-gardeners mentioned, Robert Brown, who accompanied the Australasian expedition in 1801

and described the flora of the Southern Hemisphere, was called by Humboldt the greatest botanist of the age. John Claudius Loudon, impelled by a love for agriculture and landscape-gardening, left Scotland and opened an agricultural school in England, and wrote the Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum, as well as encyclopaedias of agriculture, gardening, plants, and cottage, farm and villa architecture. Joseph Paxton, the gardener of the Duke of Devonshire, by his skill made Chatsworth the most celebrated country seat of England, and in 1851 planned and superintended the erection of the Crystal Palace, for which service he was knighted.

Page 166, note 1. The English brag to this effect, in contrast to poor Scotland, comes out in the ballad of Chevy-Chase: King James, when the news of the death of Earl Douglas reaches him, exclaims in despair,—

"'I have not any captaine more Of such account as hee.'"

But on the other side of the Border

"Like tydings to King Henry came, Within as short a space That Percy of Northumberland Was slaine in Chevy-Chase. 'Now God be with him,' said our King, 'Sith it will noe better bee; I trust I have within my realme Five hundred as good as he.'"

Page 167, note 1.

The horseman serves the horse, The neatherd serves the neat, The merchant serves the purse, The eater serves his meat;

'T is the day of the chattel, Web to weave and corn to grind; Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind. "Ode," Poems.

As a contrast to this dwarfing of the man by specialized labor Mr. Emerson took keen pleasure in every instance that he saw of Yankee "faculty" among his neighbors in the country. The war brought out much of this versatile talent. He especially enjoyed the bright and interesting narrative by Major Theodore Winthrop of the equality of the Massachusetts men to each new difficulty in the march to Washington in 1861. See Theodore Winthrop's New York Seventh Regiment; Our March to Washington, in The Atlantic Monthly for June, 1861.

Page 169, note 1. Carlyle, in a letter written to his friend in April, 1839, had said of conditions in England:—

"Scarcity, discontent, fast ripening towards desperation, extends far and wide among our working people. God help them! In man is yet small help."

Page 170, note 1. Among Mr. Emerson's notes on England are the following on her rule in India:—

"The English repair the old, and dig new canals for the irrigation of the country, cross the immense Empire with macadam roads, educate the native population in good schools; advance natives to public employment, and aim 'to elevate more and more the social condition of the peoples of Hindostan, and to put them in condition of administering their own affairs one day, by aid of the principles and the laws whose utility England will have made them comprehend, and carefully taught them the beneficent application.' Magnificent this,—the gradual detachment of the colonies which she has

planted, which have grown to Empires, and then are with dignity, and with full consent of the mother country, released from allegiance. Go—I have given you English language, laws, manners; disanglicanize yourselves if you can. United States, Canada, Australia, Cape of Good Hope, West Indies—East Indies. … It has become necessary to govern India by carefully selected agents—young men of thorough education and high ability, tried in the service. India is practically a profession to be studied as methodically as law or medicine."

XI. ARISTOCRACY

Page 173, note 1. One is reminded here of the glamour which Scott by his Waverley Novels had thrown around the nobility of England, even for readers of democratic predilections; and yet with a fairness and humanity, Tory though he was, towards the humble vassal and down-trodden peasant.

"There's Derby and Cavendish, dread of their foes; There's Erin's high Ormond and Scotland's Montrose! Would you match the base Skippon and Massey and Brown With the Barons of England that fight for the Crown?" "The Cavalier," Rokeby.

Page 173, note 2. Mr. Emerson used to tell his children of an old miracle-play in which Jesus, before submitting to be crucified, stood on his rights of knighthood as a direct descendant of King David, and challenged Pontius Pilate to single combat.

Page 175, note 1. Fuller's Worthies, vol. ii. In Mr. Emerson's notebook he gives these two fine pictures of the earl, from Fuller: "At a joust in France, fighting with Sir Collard Fines, he so bore himself that the French thought he was tied to the saddle, and to confute their jealousies, he

alighted and remounted." "Crossing into Normandy, the ship was tossed with such a tempest that Warwick caused himself and lady and infant son to be bound to the mainmast, with his armour and coat of arms upon him, that he might be known and buried aright. Yet he died in his bed."

Page 176, note 1. The Bear and Ragged Staff was the full cognizance of the Earls of Warwick.

Page 178, note 1. Reliquiae Wottonianae. This was George Villiers, the favorite of James I. and Charles I., the first duke after the revival of the title. There had been Dukes of Buckingham of the House of Stafford, but the title became extinct with the execution, by Richard III., of "the deep-revolving wily Buckingham."

Page 178, note 2. In Shakspeare's Richard III., on the morning of the battle of Bosworth Field, fatal to him, this duke, a stanch adherent of the usurper, finds this scroll in his tent:—

"Jockey of Norfolk, be not too bold, For Dickon thy master is bought and sold."

Page 178, note 3. Compare the Earth-Song in "Hamatreya" in the Poems.

Page 179, note 1. Jamblichus of Chalcis, in the fourth century B. C., a Syrian Neo-Platonist. Of him Mr. Emerson said more than once in his journals, "I expect a revival in the churches to be caused by the reading of Jamblichus."

Page 180, note 1. Opportunity to test this statement seemed to be at hand during Mr. Emerson's visit. In a letter to his wife, April 20, 1848, he wrote, "I read the newspaper daily, and the revolution, fixed for the 10th instant, occupied all men's thought until the Chartist petition was actually carried to the Commons."

Page 181, note 1. The residence of the Duke of Sutherland. Of his visit there Mr. Emerson wrote to a friend:—

JUNE 21^s^t, 1848.

The Duchess of Sutherland sent for me to come to lunch with her at two o'clock, and she would show me Stafford House. Now you must know this eminent lady lives in the best house in the Kingdom, the Queen's not excepted. I went, and was received with great courtesy by the Duchess, who is a fair, large woman, of good figure, with much dignity and sweetness, and the kindest manners. She was surrounded by company, and she presented me to the Duke of Argyle, her son-in-law, and to her sisters, the Ladies Howard. After we left the table we went through this magnificent palace, this young and friendly Duke of Argyle being my guide. He told me he had never seen so fine a banquet hall as the one we were entering; and galleries, saloons, and ante-rooms were all in the same regal proportions and richness, full everywhere with sculpture and painting. We found the Duchess in the gallery, and she showed me her most valued pictures. I asked her if she did not come on fine mornings to walk alone amidst these beautiful forms; which she professed she liked well to do. She took care to have every best thing pointed out to me, and invited me to come and see the gallery alone whenever I liked. I assure you in this little visit the two parts of Duchess and of Palace were well and truly played. … I had seen nothing so sumptuous as was all this. One would so gladly forget that there was anything else in England than these golden chambers and the high and gentle people who walk in them! May the grim Revolution with his iron hand—if come he must—come slowly and late to Stafford House, and deal softly with its inmates!

Concerning the meeting between this noble lady and Mr. Emerson, his friend wrote to him:—

I hope you penetrated the Armida Palace and did your devoir to the sublime Duchess and her Luncheon yesterday! I cannot without a certain internal amusement (foreign enough to my present humor) represent to myself such a conjunction of opposite stars! But you carry a new image off with you, and are a gainer, you. Allons. …

Yours ever truly, T. CARLYLE.

Page 181, note 2. Of Northumberland House, which stood until 1874 in Trafalgar Square, Augustus Hare said:—"One only of the great Strand palaces survived entire till our own time, and our own generation has seen and mourned the loss of Northumberland House, one of the noblest Jacobean buildings in England and the most picturesque feature in London."

Page 184, note 1. Mr. Emerson, though sympathizing with the rising of the people to assert their proper rights, took a certain pleasure in the courage shown by both sides when the storm threatened. In a letter home he said:—"One thing is certain: that if the peace of England should be broken up, the aristocracy here—or, I should say, the rich—are stout-hearted and as ready to fight for their own as the poor; are not very likely to run away." He gives this instance of "standing by one's order" from the previous century:—

"Earl Spencer when asked why he left Fox and voted for the War (in 1793), wrote:—

"'I will be very frank with you. My lot is cast among the nobility. It is not my fault that I was thus born, and that

I thus inherit. I wish to remain what I am, and to hand my father's titles and estates down to my heirs. I do not know that I thus seek my own gratification at the expense of my country, which has been very great, free and happy, under this order of things. I am satisfied that if we do not go to war with the French, this order of things will be destroyed. We may fall by the War, but we must fall without it. The thing is worth fighting for, and to fight for it we are resolved.'"

Page 184, note 2. The following notes on English politics were used in lectures on Mr. Emerson's return:—

"The English youth, highborn, has a narrow road to travel. Besides his horse and gun and his clubhouse, all he knows is the door of the House of Commons. So aristocratic is the frame of society, that the House of Commons is in the hands of the House of Lords. The Commons are the lords that shall be. Of the 658 members of the lower House, 455 have been lately shown to be representatives of the House of Lords. Before 1832 the House was violently patrician. In 1793, it was declared in a petition presented to the House by the (afterward) Earl Grey, that 307 members were put into the House by 154 persons, owners and patrons of boroughs. The Reform Bill in 1832 reduced the patronage, yet a majority of seats in the House may be filled by the nominees of the nobility. Of the Cabinet, one half is usually peers, and the other half relations of peers. Thus the aristocracy have the direction of public affairs. They naturally prize this as a career. 'Politics,' said the Duke of Norfolk to Shelley, 'is the proper career of a young man of ability in your station. That career is most advantageous, because it is a monopoly.' A little success in that line goes far, since the number of competitors is limited. In such a Parliament class-legislation is

inevitable; and offices and pensions are given to those who have votes and patronage to buy them with. Mr. Peyronnet Thompson's theory of aristocracy is, 'To make one of a family strong enough to compel the public to support all the rest.' And it only needs to look into the files of newspapers opposed to the Government in the last century to find many ugly anecdotes, which, after all allowance for party exaggeration, expose the manner of saddling the public with pensions for their children, relatives, tutors, and even bastards. The Duke of Beaufort's will left annual sums to his younger sons, which, with great naiveté, he devised should be paid until they should obtain places or pensions to certain amounts, under Government.

"An Earl of Uxbridge, with an estate of £60,000 a year, obtained an annual pension for his daughter of £300, in her own name; and after her marriage, another pension of the like sum to her, in the list of Scotch pensions, under her new name of Erskine. She continued to draw both, and the journals had their joke on the double Lady Louisa.

"These abuses were much mended by the Reform Bill. In 1780, Mr. Pitt said in the House that, 'Without a reform in Parliament, it was impossible for any honest man to remain a minister of England.'"

Page 184, note 3. Commissions in the army could then be bought.

Page 185, note 1. Again from the stray sheets on English politics:—

"One wonders how a Parliament thus constituted remains in any manner representative of the bulk of the population. But many of the younger nobles espouse the popular cause and the classes of trade and manufactures force their voices into the House. Men of brilliant popular talents like Burke,

Pitt, Mackintosh, Macaulay, Canning, Sheridan, sit for the close boroughs, and, one thing with another, we have got in modern times a wonderful assembly, its moral reputation much mended, though bribery is still permitted, but its intellectual and social reputation supreme.

"It is petulant—the common saying is that no question can be mooted, no statement made there but, out of 654 members, will find some fit and ready to sift it. That, especially, it is the most severe anthropometer or test of men. Canning said, when alarm was expressed at the probable return of O'Connell and his friends to Parliament, 'It is in Parliament I wish to see them. I have never known a demagogue who, when elected to a seat in this house, did not in the course of six months shrink to his proper dimensions.'"

Page 186, note 1.

"That repose Which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere." Tennyson, "Lady Clara Vere de Vere."

Of his experiences in London society Mr. Emerson wrote: "I am to say what is strange, but it so happened, that the higher were the persons in the social scale whom I conversed with, the less marked was their national accent, and the more I found them like the most cultivated persons in America."

Page 189, note 1. Jean de la Quintinie wrote a book on gardening which was translated into English by John Evelyn.

Arthur Young was an agricultural experimenter and writer in the last part of the eighteenth century, and wrote several important works on the subject of agricultural in England and the use of waste lands. His Travels in France is quoted by Carlyle often in his French Revolution. George III. contributed to his Annals of Agriculture under the name of Ralph Robinson.

In these Annals, Young highly praises the improvements in cultivation and cattle-breeding made by Robert Bakewell in the middle of the eighteenth century.

John Joseph Mechi, a great authority on scientific farming, attained remarkable results in Essex by irrigating his farm with liquefied manure by steam-power.

Page 189, note 2. In Dibdin's Literary Reminiscences, vol. 1., xii.

Page 189, note 3. Mr. Emerson took great pleasure in the naif account of his life and adventures, given by the valiant and philosophic Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury. He was the elder brother of George Herbert, the poet.

Page 190, note 1. Penshurst in Kent was Sir Philip Sidney's birthplace, and Wilton House the residence of his sister the Countess of Pembroke.

Sir Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, wrote The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney.

Page 191, note 1. In the lecture "Natural Aristocracy" which Mr. Emerson gave in London, after granting the claims of the really great to honor and place, he said, "But mankind do not extend the same indulgence to those who claim and enjoy the same prerogative, but render no returns. The day is darkened when the golden river runs down into mud; when genius grows idle and wanton and reckless of its fine duties of being Saint, Prophet, Inspirer to its humble fellows, baulks their respect and confounds their understanding by silly extravagances. … To live without duties is obscene." He made so much allowance for the outrages to which the misdeeds of idle aristocrats might incite the poor and ignorant that Lord Morpeth urged him to suppress the passage, should he give the lecture again. It still stands in the essay on "Aristocracy" in Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Page 192, note 1. George Selwyn (1719-91), the friend of Horace Walpole.

Page 193, note 1. Causes Célèbres Étrangères, publiées en France pour la première fois, et traduites de l' Espagnol, l' Italien et l' Allemagne. Paris: 1827-28. Par une Sociétê de jurisconsultes et de gens de lettres.

Another work of the same kind is the Causes Célèbres, Répertoire générale des causes célèbres anciennes et modernes, rédigé par une Société d'hommes de lettres sous la direction de B. Saint-Edme. Paris: Rosier, 1834-35.

An English work appeared in 1849, entitled: Celebrated Trials connected with the Aristocracy in the Relations of Private Life. London: W. Benning & Co., 1849.

Page 195, note 1. A clergyman who prepared students for the examinations of admission to Oxford and Cambridge told the editor that, even in the colleges in which the standard of scholarship was very high, rank was, to some extent, accepted as an equivalent.

Page 195, note 2. History of English Universities, "Die englischen Universitäten," by Victor Aimé Huber (2 vols. Cassel, 1839-40), was translated into English by Francis William Newman.

Page 195, note 3.

"Some great estates provide, but not A mastering mind, so both are lost thereby." Herbert, The Church Porch.

Page 197, note 1.

The lord is the peasant that was, The peasant the lord that shall be.

Who liveth in the palace hall Waneth fast and spendeth all. "Woodnotes," II., Poems.

XII. UNIVERSITIES

Page 199, note 1. This friend was Arthur Hugh Clough, the poet, and translator of Plutarch. Mr. Emerson, on his return, reviewed with much praise his poem "The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich," in the Massachusetts Quarterly Review (March, 1849), then edited by Theodore Parker.

Mr. Clough visited Mr. Emerson later and spent a winter in Cambridge. From Oxford Mr. Emerson wrote of dining at Exeter College with Palgrave, Froude, and other Fellows, and at Oriel with Clough and Dr. Daubeny. "They showed me the kindest attentions, … but more, they showed me themselves; who are many of them very earnest, faithful, affectionate, some of them highly gifted men; some of them, too, prepared and decided to make great sacrifices for conscience' sake. Froude is a noble youth to whom my heart warms. … Truly I became fond of these monks of Oxford."

Soon after leaving Oxford Mr. Emerson received a letter from Mr. Froude of which the following is an extract:—

EXETER COLLEGE [OXFORD], JUNE 6, [1848].

MY DEAR MR. EMERSON,—

… Your own visit here, short as it was, was not without its service to us; you left luminous traces of your presence in the words you scattered from you, which as yet the birds of the air have not devoured. Horace's Segnius irritant animos1 5.1 is only half true. One sentence spoken is worth a hundred written. In a few years, I hope, even here in Oxford,

you will see whole acres yellow with the corn of your sowing, and logic-mills grinding it and professors baking it in their lecture-rooms into bread for hungry students.

Believe me ever

Your very much obliged J. A. FROUDE.

Page 200, note 1. "Let the blessed bless; he is blessed, let him be blessed."

Page 201, note 1. Erasmus thus expressed his surprise and delight in Oxford, regenerated by the influence of John Colet, whither he had gone to study Greek (newly introduced by Grocyn), because he was too poor to go to Italy: "I have found in Oxford so much polish and learning that now I hardly care to go to Italy at all, save for the sake of having been there. When I listen to my friend Colet it seems like listening to Plato himself. Who does not wonder at the wide range of Grocyn's knowledge? What can be more searching, deep and refined than the judgment of Linacre? When did Nature mould a temper more gentle, endearing and happy than the temper of Thomas More?"1 5.2

Page 201, note 2. Albericus Gentilis (1552-1608), a celebrated jurist and early authority on international law. Driven from Italy and Austria by the Inquisition, he was recommended to University of Oxford by the Earl of Leicester and received with much honor there.

Page 201, note 3. Casaubon, the Swiss theologian and critic, protected and made royal librarian at Paris by Henry IV., was so annoyed by Catholic jealousy that he passed his latter days in England, where he was made prebendary of Canterbury.

Page 201, note 4. The Life of William Morris by J. W. Mackail, and the story of Tom Brown at Oxford by the late Thomas Hughes, give extraordinary pictures of sleepy and perfunctory instruction at Oxford colleges and the idle life there until the very recent awakening.

Page 202, note 1. Leviathan, or the Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil, containing the complete system of Hobbes's materialistic philosophy.

Page 204, note 1. Huber's History of English Universities, vol. ii. p.304.

Page 205, note 1. Five Years in an English University, by Charles Astor Bristed (1852).

Page 207, note 1. Mr. Emerson, always regretting that, as Dr. John Collins Warren said of him in his boyhood, "he had no stamina," wrote thus to his friend Sterling in 1844: "I do not know how it happens, but there are but seven hours, often but five, in an American scholar's day; the twelve, thirteen, fifteen, that we have heard of in German libraries, are fabulous to us. Probably in England you find a mean between Massachusetts and Germany. The performances of Goethe, the performances of Scott, appear superhuman to us in their quantity, let alone their quality."

Page 209, note 1. Huber's History of English Universities.

Page 209, note 2. Bristed's Five Years in an English University.

Page 211, note 1. Later Mr. Emerson wrote: "At home I am still struck with the superior animal vigor of the average Englishman; as if the English were pasture-oaks, and the Americans fine saplings."

It should be remembered, however, that this was written

before the reaction towards due physical culture in America set in, which culminates now in extreme athleticism.

Page 212, note 1. Both these Russian posts were captured by the Allies in the Crimean War, but I cannot find evidence of personal hostile action taken by their governors. Perhaps stories of such were in the newspapers of the day.

Page 213, note 1. The "poetic influence from the heart of Oxford" evidently refers to Arthur Hugh Clough, Mr. Emerson's friend and host there, and four years later his guest in America, whose charming hexameter poem, The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, was just published. Mr. Clough's increasingly liberal views made him feel bound in honor to resign his Fellowship, the holder of which is required to belong to the Church of England.

Page 213, note 2. Wordsworth, and, probably, Byron.

XIII. RELIGION

Page 215, note 1. As he says elsewhere, he felt that the Briton was temperamentally a worshipper of Fate. As for "this mountain of stone," he hoped that among the generation then rising in England would appear men who would, as he had done, remember Jesus' word: "If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you."

Page 215, note 2. To this thought before Dundee Church he adds in his notebook, "And at other times I say, If idealists will work as well as these men wrought, we shall see a new world apace."

Page 216, note 1. The contemporary monkish chronicler of the deeds of Richard Coeur de Lion in Palestine. It is included in Bohn's Chronicles of the Crusades.

Page 217, note 1. Wordsworth, note to "Ecclesiastical Sonnets," XVIII. He also speaks of the Established clergy

of England as being, in many parts, "the principal bulwark against barbarism."

Page 219, note 1. John Sterling, in a letter written to Mr. Emerson in 1841, speculates as to what kind of audiences he finds in America—audiences that must be very different from those in England. He says: "Here we have not only the same aggressive, material element as in the United States, but a second fact unknown there, namely, the social authority of Church Orthodoxy derived from the close connection between the Aristocracy (that is, the Rich) and the Clergy. And odd it is to see that, so far as appears on the surface, the last twenty-five years have produced more of this instead of less."1 5.3

Page 220, note 1. Fuller's Worthies of England.

Page 220, note 2. Mr. Emerson notes that "Certain doctrines are offensive to their mind; for example, the metamorphosis or passage of souls. Englishmen hate it. It vexes the common sense." The possibility that he might become a Frenchman or Spaniard might account for this fear. Swedenborg, Mr. Emerson mentions, found the English in a heaven apart.

Page 221, note 1. From the notebook on England: "Four things they believe in, namely, Shakspeare's genius, commerce, pit-coal, and the steam-engine.

"English Church gets to be an enormous doll with old ladies of both sexes to dress and dandle it."

Page 222, note 1. Journal, 1848. "At the dinner of the Geological Club, I sat between Sir Henry De la Bèche and Lord Selkirk. When I remarked that I understood the accepted view of the creation of races to be, that many individuals appeared simultaneously, and not one pair only, Lord

S. replied, that there is no geological fact which is at variance with the Mosaic history."

Page 223, note 1. Augustus Pugin, an Englishman of French descent, an admirable architectural draughtsman. He published in 1821 Specimens of Gothic Architecture selected from various ancient Edifices in England, and later, other important illustrated works of the same sort.

Page 224, note 1. Thomas Taylor (1758-1835), a remarkable scholar and apostle of Plato and the Neoplatonists. He translated Aristotle, Plato, Proclus, Plotinus, Pausanius, Jamblichus, and Porphyry. Niebuhr in his Letters says of him, "Through a singular philosophical mysticism, derived from the Platonist, he became an orthodox polytheist and adherent of the mystical interpretation of the popular religion of the Greeks." In his translation of the Cratylus Taylor calls Christianity "a certain most irrational and gigantic impiety."

Page 224, note 2. English notebook. "The English have no national religion and have imported the Hebrew."

Page 224, note 3. The Saracens are pressing the little force of the English Crusaders hard, and the battle seems going against them. Richard, having done his utmost, thus makes his argumentum ad Deum: "O God! O God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me? For whom have we foolish Christians, for whom have we English come hither from the farthest part of the earth to bear our arms? Is it not for the God of the Christians? O fie! How good art Thou to the people who now are, for Thy name, given up to the sword: we shall become a portion for foxes. Oh how unwilling should I be to forsake Thee in so forlorn and dreadful a position, were I Thy Lord and Advocate as Thou art mine. In sooth my standards will in future be despised not through my fault, but through Thine; in sooth not through any cowardice

in my warfare art Thou Thyself, my King and my God, conquered this day, and not Richard Thy vassal!"

Page 224, note 4. In his sketch of the Rev. Dr. Ripley, in Lectures and Biographical Sketches, Mr. Emerson gives some amusing extracts from the diary of his great-grandfather, the Rev. Joseph Emerson of Malden, on his purchase of a "shay." "The Lord grant it may be a comfort and blessing to my family," says the good man, like Pepys. But accidents and misgivings of conscience, because he deemed these to be chastisements of the Lord for his pride, followed, and in six months he sold this vehicle of wrath, as Pepys would not have done.

Page 225, note 1. Showing a survival of a trace of the spirit of the English of the twelfth century. The monk Richard of Devizes in his chronicle relates with delight that on the Coronation-day of King Richard, which happened to be on Good Friday, "About the self-same hour that the Son was immolated to the Father, a sacrifice of the Jews to their father the Devil began in all parts of the Kingdom;" and that they "despatched their blood-suckers with blood to hell."

Page 225, note 2. Mr. Emerson notes this list of the triumphs of English conscience and good sense over national conservatism, in the nineteenth century:—

• 1826. Catholic Emancipation.
• 1832. Reform Bill.
• 1846. Repeal of Corn Laws;
• Repeal of Navigation Laws.
• 1834. West Indian Emancipation;
• Dissenters Chapels bill;
• Unitarians and Quakers in Parliament;
• Sugar duties abolished;
• Republics acknowledged.

Mr. Pitt said in Parliament in 1780, that, "without a reform in Parliament, it was impossible for any honest man to remain a minister of England."

Page 228, note 1. John Sterling, a man of brilliant parts and noble character, who had been in his youth and while his health permitted a curate devoted to his people, soon found his growing spirit cramped by the creed of the Church of England. He went through an experience like Emerson's, and they became close friends, through letters. Sterling wrote to his friend in December, 1841: "How remarkable it is that the critical and historical difficulties of the Bible were pointed out by clear-sighted English writers more than a century ago, and thence passed through Voltaire into the whole mind of Continental Europe, and yet that in this country both the facts and the books about them remain utterly unknown, except to a few recluses! The overthrow of our dead Biblical Dogmatism must, however, be preparing, and may be nearer than appears. The great curse is the wretched and seemingly hopeless pedantry of our Monastic Colleges at Oxford and Cambridge."1 5.4

Six months later he writes more hopefully: "Thought is leaking into this country. Even Strauss sells."

About the time of Mr. Emerson's first visit to England, Newman and Pusey had begun the Anglo-Catholic movement; ten years later Newman had formally retracted his charges against the Church of Rome, and in 1845 had joined that church, returning to England, during the time of Mr. Emerson's second visit, to establish religious houses there.

Page 228, note 2. Here are some further items from the English notebook:—

"They punish dissent:—they punish education. So late as

1831, marriages performed by Dissenters were illegal, and the children of such marriages bastards. So late as 12 Geo. III., a Catholic priest who married a Catholic and Protestant was liable to the punishment of death; and later to a fine of £500. So late as 59 Geo. III., 23 June, 1819, trial by single combat was abolished.

"'Decent debility,' said Sydney Smith of the clergy."

Page 229, note 1. George Borrow, the Englishman who lived and wandered with the Gypsies to study them, the author of The Zincali, Lavengro (partly autobiographical), and The Romany Rye. He was for a time in the employ of the British and Foreign Bible Society.

Page 230, note 1. In conversation at a dinner-party where Mr. Emerson met him, "Macaulay said, he had arrested on its progress to be printed a bill for civilising and Christianising the natives of … in Africa, appropriating … thousand pounds, first for an expense of … pounds for adjusting pipes, etc., on the paddle wheels of steamboat for squirting hot water on the natives," etc.

"A Unitarian," he said, "will presently be shown as a Dodo,—an extinct race."

Page 230, note 2. In acknowledging English Traits, December 2, 1856, Carlyle wrote: "That Chapter on the Church is inimitable; 'the Bishop asking a troublesome gentleman to take wine,'—you should see the kind of grin it awakens here on our best kind of faces. Excellent the manner of that, and the matter too dreadfully true in every part. I do not much seize your idea in regard to 'Literature,' though I do details of it, and will try again. Glad of that too even in its half state; not 'sorry' at any part of it,—you Sceptic!"

Page 230, note 3. On his return home Mr. Emerson

writes in his journal of the question of his wife: "Lidian asks if I saw the spiritual class. Oh no, I saw the ox and the ass, but rarely the driver."

Page 231, note 1. This thought of the passing of the Spirit, its newness, its surprise, is found again in the Poems in the last lines of "Woodnotes," II., and in "Worship."

XIV. LITERATURE

Page 232, note 1. As introductory to this chapter this entry may be copied from Mr. Emerson's notebook of 1878: "40 per cent. of the English people cannot write their names. One half of one per cent. of the Massachusetts people cannot, and these are probably Britons born.

"It is certain that more people speak English correctly in the United States than in Britain."

Page 233, note 1. "The Englishman," Emerson says in a lecture after his return, "stands in awe of a fact as something final and irreversible, and confines his thoughts and his aspirations to the means of dealing with it to advantage; he does not seek to comprehend it, but only to utilize it for enjoyment or display, at any rate to adapt himself to it; and he values only the faculties that enable him to do this. He admires talent and is careless of ideas. 'The English have no higher heaven than Fate.'"

Page 235, note 1. Mr. Emerson, though valuing the classics, and most careful in choosing the word that from its composition and association would most accurately give his meaning, sought plain Saxon words to make his thought clear to his lyceum audiences, and in many of his earlier published poems sacrificed music to vigor, as in the line—

Boon Nature yields each day a brag.

Later his ear became finer. His style is remarkably Saxon. If his children brought home the word commence from school he bade them forget it and say begin.

Page 237, note 1. Again the speech of the English King, in Chevy-Chase, on the fall of Percy, is recalled:—

"I trust I have within my realms Five hundred as good as he."

Page 238, note 1. William Camden (1551-1623), who wrote the Annals of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth. James Usher (1580-1656), the Irish prelate, author of the Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti. John Selden (1584-1664), "the great Dictator of Learning of the English nation," best known by his Table-Talk. Joseph Mede (1586-1628), the theologian who attempted the explanation of the Book of Revelation in his Clavis Apocalyptica. Thomas Gataker (1574-1654), a divine who edited the writings of Marcus Aurelius and wrote on the Stoics. Richard Hooker (1553-1600), the author of the Ecclesiastical Polity. Jeremy Taylor (1613-67), the chaplain of Charles I., wrote the Liberty of Prophesying, the Great Exemplar, but especially the Holy Living and Holy Dying. Mr. Emerson in "The Problem" calls him

The younger Golden Lips or mines, Taylor, the Shakspeare of divines.

Robert Burton (1576-1640), who wrote the Anatomy of Melancholy, which Dr. Johnson said was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise, and Byron found the most exciting and instructive medley of quotations and classical anecdotes. Richard Bentley (1662-1742), the head of Cambridge University, remarkable for his critical study of the classics. Brian Walton (1600-61), the editor of the Polyglot Bible from nine languages, and Oriental scholar.

Page 238, note 2. By comparison with what Mr. Emerson

says later in this chapter, and elsewhere through the book and in letters, it is evident that this tint of Platonism refers to English scholars of another age, not to those he met.

Page 238, note 3. In the journal of 1838-39 Mr. Emerson wrote: "Bacon's perfect law of inquiry after truth was that nothing should be in the globe of matter which was not also in the globe of crystal; that is, nothing should take place as event in life which did not also exist as truth in the mind."

Page 240, note 1. Mr. Emerson, impatient of the modern writers on metaphysics, waiting in vain for the man who should deal with the worlds of spirit and matter worthily, wished to make his contributions, however fragmentary, towards the grand theme. As early as 1835 he made notes towards this end, beginning thus: "By the First Philosophy is meant the original laws of the mind. It is the science of what is, in distinction from what appears. It is one mark of them that their enunciation awakens the feeling of the moral sublime, and great men are they who believe in them. They resemble great circles in Astronomy, each of which, in what direction soever it is drawn, contains the whole sphere." Mr. Emerson's strength failed him when at length the opportunity seemed to come to give some form and completeness to this work, for which through the years he had made notes, in the invitation to give a course on Philosophy at Harvard University. Many of the notes were already embodied in other lectures; the fragments of the course were collected by Mr. Cabot in the opening paper of the volume called Natural History of Intellect.1 5.5

Page 241, note 1. Bacon quotes here from Plutarch's

Morals a corrupted form of a saying of Heracleitus. I am indebted to Professor Wright of Harvard University for the following curious account of the steps of the perversion. Heracleitus wrote, αὔη ψυΧὴ σοφωτάτη χαὶ ἀρίστη, "a dry soul is wisest and best," as what is dry is most near to fire and fire is at the top of Heracleitus's upward way. Αὔη being an unusual word, a commentator explained it by putting σηρή, a more usual word, as explanatory, beside it, so that now the sentence read αὔη (σηρή) ψυΧὴ ψυΧὴ σοφωτάτη χαὶ ἀρίστη, etc., which might be rendered "a dry (i. e. not moist) soul," etc. Then the original αὔη was dropped and σηρή substituted in some versions. But before this was done, while αὔη and σηρή stood side by side, some transcriber took αὔη for αὺγη (light), so the sentence now stood αὺγη σηρή, "the light is dry; soul is wisest and best," or, differently punctuated, "as a dry light the soul is wisest and best." It is the last form that Plutarch quotes.

The "dry light" is also alluded to in "Manners," Essays, Second Series, page 140.

Page 241, note 2. From the Phaedrus.

Page 241, note 3. Jan Baptista van Helmont (1577-1644), the eminent Flemish physician, experimenter, and writer, author of the Ortus and the Progressus Medicinae, The Magnetic Cure of Wounds, The Image of God in Man, and other works.

Page 242, note 1. Mr. Emerson refers to the Chaldaean Oracles, quoted often by Thomas Taylor. In his note-book he says they are "from Zoroaster, or else utterances of the Theurgists under Marcus Antoninus."

Page 242, note 2. The quotation from Spenser is from "A Hymne in honour of Beautie," the whole stanza being quoted on page 14 of Essays. Second Series.

Page 242, note 3. In a letter to Miss Fuller in 1841, Mr. Emerson speaks of "the joy with which in my boyhood I caught the first hint of the Berkeleyan philosophy, and which I certainly never lost sight of afterwards. …I could see that there was a Cause behind every stump and clod, and by the help of some fine words could make every old wagon and wood-pile and stone wall oscillate a little and threaten to dance; nay, give me a fair field, and the selectmen of Concord and the Rev. Pound-me-down himself began to look unstable and vaporous."1 5.6

Page 242, note 4. Dr. Samuel Clarke (1675-1729), a clergyman and remarkable scholar, author of The Being and Attributes of God, as well as other religious and scientific works, important in their day. He translated some of Sir Isaac Newton's works into English. Of him Mr. Emerson notes, "'T is curious, that Newton's theory of gravitation was introduced into the teaching of the Universities, by stealth. Sam Clarke taught, in the text, the old Ptolemaic theory; and, in the notes only, explained the new philosophy, which, of course, needed only to be explained in order gradually to supersede the old." James Harrington (1611-77), author of many political treatises, especially the Oceana, The Grounds and Reasons for Monarchy Considered, and The Prerogative of Popular Government.

Page 243, note 1. As confirming this love of the English, even of their scholars, to feel the solid ground of the understanding beneath their feet, may be quoted the remark of Dr. Paul Weber in his History of Philosophy: "English philosophy is to this day almost as empirical and positivistic as in the times of Bacon and Locke."

Page 244, note 1. Sterling, writing to Emerson in 1841,

said that, twenty years earlier, to the English mind "Wordsworth and Coleridge were mystagogues lurking in caverns, and German literature thought of with a good deal less favor than we are now disposed to show towards that of China." Emerson, writing in answer to this and another letter, said: "Your picture of England I was very glad to have. It confirms my own impressions … I think the most intellectual class of my countrymen look to Germany rather than to England for their recent culture, and Coleridge, I suppose, has always had more readers here than in Britain."

Page 245, note 1. It appears in Mr. Cabot's memoir that Mr. Emerson read Hume—"the Scotch Goliath" he calls him—at the age of twenty, and made probably overmuch of Hume's doubts and objections in spiritual matters, in a letter to his Aunt Mary, with purpose to stir her up to writing a vigorous letter of refutation.

Page 245, note 2. Mr. Emerson met Hallam at the house of Mr. Milman, the historian, and dined with him later at Lord Ashburton's, "sitting between Mr. Hallam and Lord Northampton." He wrote, "Hallam was very courteous and communicative and has since called on me." In the note-book he records: "Mr. Hallam asked me 'whether Swedenborg were all mad, or partly so.' He knew nothing of Thomas Taylor, nor did Milman, nor any Englishman."

Page 247, note 1. Mr. Emerson dined with Dickens and Carlyle at Mr. John Forster's. The writings of Dickens did not attract him. He had read in one or two of the earlier books. In 1837 he wrote in his journal:—

"Two or three events, two or three objects, large or small, suffice to genius. Let dulness work with multitudes and magnitudes. The poor Pickwick stuff (into which I have only looked and with no wish for more) teaches this, that prose

and parlors and shops and city widows, the tradesman's dinner, and such matters, are as good materials in a skilful hand for interest and art as palaces and revolutions."

He made the following entry in his journal two years later: "I have read Oliver Twist, in obedience to the opinions of so many intelligent people as have praised it. The author has an acute eye for costume; he sees the expression of dress, of form, of gait, of personal deformities; of furniture, of the outside and inside of houses; but his eye rests always on surfaces, he has no insight into character. For want of key to the moral powers, the author is fain to strain all his stage trick of grievance, of bodily terror, of murder and the most approved performances of Remorse. It all avails nothing. There is nothing memorable in the book except the flash, which is got at a police-office, and the dancing of the madman, which strikes a momentary terror. Like Cooper and Hawthorne he has no dramatic talent. The moment he attempts dialogue the improbability of life hardens to wood and stone. And the book begins and ends without a poetic ray, and so perishes in the reading."

I find this mention of Bulwer in the journal for 1842: "Zanoni. We must not rail if we read the book. Of all the ministers to luxury these novel-writers are the best. It is a trick, a juggle. We are cheated into laughter or wonder by feats which only oddly combine acts that we do every day. There is no new element, no power, no furtherance. It is only confectionery, not the raising of new corn; and being such, there is no limit to its extension and multiplication. … But Zanoni pains us, and the author gets no respect from us because he speedily shows us that his view is partial; that this power which he gives to his hero is a toy, and not flowing from its legitimate fountains in the mind, is a power

for London, a divine power converted into a highwayman's pistol to rob and kill with."

Mr. Emerson met Thackeray in England, and probably later in Boston. He read only one of his books; of the painful impression left upon him by this he writes in the journal for 1850: "Thackeray's Vanity Fair is pathetic in its name, and in his use of the name; an admission it is from a man of fashion in the London of 1850, that poor old puritan Bunyan was right in his perception of the London of 1650. And yet now in Thackeray is the added wisdom of skepticism, that, though this be really so, he must yet live in tolerance of, and practically in homage and obedience to these illusions. And there is in the book an admission, too, which seems somewhat new in literature, akin to Froude's Formula in the Nemesis, that 'Moral deterioration follows on a diminished exchequer;' and State Street thinks it is easy for a rich man to be honourable, but that in failing circumstances, no man can be relied on to keep his integrity."

Page 247, note 2. Mr. Emerson met Macaulay, "that Niagara of information," as Fanny Kemble used to call him, at least twice, at private houses. Of the table-talk on one of these occasions Mr. Alexander Ireland, in his biographical sketch of Emerson, says: "He witnessed one of Macaulay's brilliant feats in conversation at a dinner where Hallam was one of the guests. The talk was on the question whether the 'additional letters,' lately published by Carlyle, were spurious or genuine. Emerson afterwards, describing the conversation, said: … 'Macaulay overcame everybody at the table, including Hallam, by pouring out with victorious volubility instances of the use of words in a different meaning from that they bore in Cromwell's time, or by citing words which were not in use at all until half a century later. A

question, which might have been settled in a few minutes by the consent of a few men of insight, opened a tiresome controversy which lasted during the whole dinner. Macaulay seemed to have the best of it; still, I did not like the arrogance with which he paraded his minute information; but then there was a fire, speed, fury, talent and effrontery in the fellow which were very taking.'"

Mr. Ireland adds, "Carlyle, in speaking of Macaulay, used sometimes to exclaim, 'Flow on, thou Shining River,' following up with his accustomed loud shout of laughter."

Page 248, note 1. Sir David Brewster, the biographer of Sir Isaac Newton. Brewster was himself a successful investigator in the field of optics, and a writer of distinction.

Page 248, note 2. Robert Hooke (1635-1703), the eminent mathematician and physicist who disputed with Newton the honor of the discovery of the law of gravitation. Robert Boyle (1626-91), the physical experimenter and learned writer sometimes called "the Christian Philosopher." Edmund Halley (1656-1742), the distinguished astronomer and mathematician, the friend of Newton, whose Principia he published at his own expense.

Page 249, note 1. Coleridge had died the year after Mr. Emerson's visit to him, described earlier in this volume. Carlyle, in announcing his death to his friend, had written, "How great a Possibility, how small a realized Result!"

Among Mr. Emerson's papers is a short printed notice of his own life and works, designed for a handbook of contemporary biography sent by the English editor in 1859 to him for revision and correction. It says, "In 1849 Emerson visited England, receiving a cordial reception from the literary society of London" [Mr. Emerson here added "and rather alarming the religious society of Glasgow"]. The editor alludes

to English Traits as a work "singularly fair and justly. appreciative," but says that "his influence upon the British mind has been comparatively limited. This circumstance is perhaps accounted for by the fact that he is more an interpreter of Coleridge and Carlyle than an original thinker." Mr. Emerson's marginal comment was, "He must be a superficial reader of Emerson who fancies him an interpreter of Coleridge or Carlyle."

Page 250, note 1. All Emerson's love for Carlyle was needed to allow for his friend's attitude of despair for his day and hopelessness for his generation. In the early letters Carlyle, while praising each particular work that his friend sent him, was constantly urging on him his doctrine of Silence, sitting still,—doing, not teaching. Fortunately Emerson listened to his Genius rather than to his friend. He writes in his English notebook: "It is droll to hear this talker talking against talkers, and this writer writing against writing. He has such vigor of constitution that he can dispose of poison very well. He is a bacchanal in the strong waters of vituperation."

Shortly before the publication of English Traits Emerson wrote to Carlyle: "I say to myself, the high-seeing, austerely exigent friend whom I elected, and who elected me, twenty years and more ago, finds me heavy and silent, when all the world elects and loves him. Yet I have not changed. I have the same pride in his genius, the same sympathy with the Genius that governs his, the old love with the old limitations, though love and limitation be all untold. And I see well what a piece of Providence he is, how material he is to the times, which must always have a solo Soprano to balance the roar of the orchestra. The solo sings the theme; the orchestra roars antagonistically, but follows. And have I not put him into my Chapter of 'English Spiritual Tendencies,' with all

thankfulness to the Eternal Creator,—though the chapter lie unborn in a trunk?"

Page 250, note 2. In his journal for 1851, Mr. Emerson recalls the high esteem in which he had at first held Wilkinson for ability, power of labor, acute vision, "and especially the power I so value, and so rarely meet, of expansion, expansion such as Alcott shines with, but all this spoiled by a certain levity." He then laments his "changing his sphere from Swedenborg's mysticism to French Fourierism." Wilkinson, on his part, in a later criticism of Emerson for his limited acceptance of Swedenborg, made the amusing charge of narrow and timid Unitarianism.

Page 251, note 1. In a fragment of a lecture called "Anglo-Saxon" is this passage on the lack of original aesthetic sense:—

"The English race must take rank with the Roman and the Turk as being born for power, but without art. They cannot make a pattern for a pitcher, they cannot build well, or paint, or carve, or dance. Then England has no music. It has never produced a first-rate composer, and accepts only such music as has already been decided to be good in Italy and Germany. They seem to have great delight in these things, but not original appreciation; and value them as showy commodities, which they buy at great prices for pride. But they firmly hold what they have once been taught,—as well the peculiarities of a picture, or style of building, as the rule for breaking a line of battle; and all England thinks as one man, on the merits of the Italian masters, as on the genuineness of the canonical Bible. … 'England never did or can look at art otherwise than as a commodity it can buy.' Hogarth and Wilkie and Landseer with their humour and homeliness and veracity are truly national artists. In sculpture, never a quite

original genius. The superb scholarship of Flaxman's sculpture is far the best they have had, and, in general, their artists show total want of all object, with great powers of execution. Their drawing has the highest finish but no grandeur."

Page 254, note 1. This was written at the time when Science, newly freed from bonds of a priori considerations of Theology and Philosophy, was on its guard against other than material considerations, especially in unimaginative England. Mr. Emerson, with his belief that the same laws ruled mind and matter, was impatient of this attitude and was more interested in the wide views of the German and French savans. In John Hunter's work he took great interest. Comparative anatomy, ever since at the museum of the Fardin des Plantes, in 1833, he had been startled by the view of the upward series of creation from monad to man, had commanded his respect. Richard Owen, celebrated for his studies in this branch, had shown him the Hunterian Museum of which he was curator, and doubtless explained the ideas of evolution as far as they were then recognized. Mr. Emerson very probably also met Robert Brown, the great botanist and explorer of vegetable physiology.

Page 254, note 2. He wrote in the notebook: "The people have wide range, but no ascending range in their speculations. An American, like a German, has many platforms of thought. But an Englishman requires to be treated with tenderness if he wishes to climb." John Sterling, his friend, said, "Think if we had a dozen such to stand up for ideas, as Cobden and his friends do for machinery."

Page 255, note 1. This was before William Morris's day, who not only awakened his people to the hideousness of their expensive furniture and stuffs, but gave them things beautiful and honest, and said, moreover, that if a family could do but

one thing to beautify their home, the best would be to make, in the street in front of it, a bonfire of two thirds of the contents.

Page 256, note 1. Here, as elsewhere in the book, Mr. Emerson only presents one aspect of the case. In his poem "The Harp" he speaks of

Scott, the delight of generous boys,

but he never outgrew his love for the poet and the man. See in Miscellanies his remarks at the Scott Centennial Anniversary.

Page 257, note 1. Before this visit to England, Mr. Emerson wrote much in two papers in the Dial (now included in the volume Natural History of Intellect) of

Wordsworth, Pan's recording voice,

as he calls him in "The Harp." In a late notebook he said, "I may say of Wordsworth what Cartwright said of Fletcher,—

"'What he would write, he was before he writ.'"

In 1870 Mr. Emerson made this note: "I ought to write a paper on Wordsworth partly from my Dial paper, and partly from MSS." Some of the latter may appear in the extracts from the journals. The following comparison of the poets, written in 1868, should, however, appear here:—

"Wordsworth is manly, the manliest poet of his age. His poems record the thoughts and emotions which have occupied his mind, and which he reports because of their reality. He has great skill in rendering them into simple and sometimes happiest poetic speech. Tennyson has incomparable felicity in all poetic forms, and is a brave thoughtful Englishman, exceeds Wordsworth a hundred fold in rhythmic power and variety, but far less manly compass; and Tennyson's main

purpose is the rendering, whilst Wordsworth's is just value of the dignity of the thought."

Page 258, note 1. Of his first meeting with Tennyson he writes:—

"I saw Tennyson first at the house of Coventry Patmore, where we dined together. I was contented with him at once. He is tall and scholastic looking, no dandy, but a great deal of plain strength about him, and, though cultivated, quite unaffected. Quiet, sluggish sense and thought; refined as all English are, and good-humoured. There is in him an air of general superiority that is very satisfactory. He lives with his college set, … and has the air of one who is accustomed to be petted and indulged by those he lives with. Take away Hawthorne's bashfulness, and let him talk easily and fast, and you would have a pretty good Tennyson." Yet, in most other accounts of Tennyson heard by Mr. Emerson, his silence, his devotion to his pipe and a certain dreamy helplessness are dwelt upon.

In the paper "Europe and European Books," written in 1843, reprinted from the Dial in Natural History of Intellect, may be found Mr. Emerson's feeling about Tennyson's poetry at that time. In the essay on "The Poet" (page 9) Tennyson is criticised. But in the journal of 1871, after some complaint at the sacrifice of natural strength to finish in Tennyson's second volume of poems, he adds: "And yet, tried by one of my tests, it was not found wholly wanting. I mean that it was liberating; it slipped, or caused to slide a little, 'this mortal coil.' The poems of 'Locksley Hall' and 'The Talking Oak,' I bear cheerful witness, both gave me to feel a momentary share of freedom and power."

When he read "Ulysses" he was inclined to "question whether there is taste in England to do justice to the poet."

In 1846 he notes: "Tennyson and Browning, though full of talent, remind one of the catbird's knowing music." And again:—

"The office of poetry, I supposed, was Tyrtaean,—consoling, indemnifying; and, of the Uranian, deifying or imparadising. Homer did what he could,—and Callimachus, Pindar, and the Greek tragedians; Horace and Persius; Dante was faithful, and Milton, Shakspeare and Herbert. But now shall I find my heavenly bread in Tennyson? or in Milnes? in Lowell? or in Longfellow? Yet Wordsworth was mindful of the office."

Page 259, note 1. Preface to translation of the Bhagavad Gîtâ (1785) by Sir Charles Wilkins.

Page 260, note 1. John Sterling, the unseen friend and correspondent, who died three years before this visit of Emerson's to England, was eminently one of this first class. Brilliant and faithful, an advancing mind and a poet, he illuminated the lives of his friends, even the sad Carlyle, his biographer, who loved him strangely, though flouting his hopes and purposes.

XV. THE TIMES

Page 261, note 1. John Baron Somers of Evesham, the eminent lawyer and Whig statesman, Lord Chancellor of England under William and Mary.

Page 262, note 1. Winthrop Mackworth Praed, the Greek scholar and poet, who was also in Parliament. John Hookham Frere, the diplomat and scholar, one of the founders of the Quarterly Review. William Maginn, the versatile Irish contributor to Blackwood, the Quarterly Review, Fraser's Magazine, etc. Theodore Edward Hook, a brilliant writer and society wit, noted for his successful conduct of John Bull, a newspaper established in the interest of the King as against that of Queen Caroline. Thomas Hood, the poet,

was editor of the Comic Annual, the New Monthly and Hood's magazines. His "Song of the Shirt" appeared first in Punch.

Page 264, note 1. Fragment of lecture on English Civilization:—

"England never stands for the cause of freedom on the Continent, but only for English trade. She did not stand for the freedom of Schleswig-Holstein, but for the King of Denmark. She did not stand for the Hungarians, but for Austria. It was accordant that Lord Palmerston, reputed liberal, should favor Louis Napoleon's usurpation. England meantime is liberal, but the power of England is with the aristocracy who never go for liberty unless England itself is threatened."

Page 266, note 1. The Times was founded by John Walter, who had purchased the patent method of "logography," a great improvement in printing. Issued at first as the London Daily Universal Register, in 1785, three years later the title became The Times, or Daily Universal Register. Walter's son, bearing his father's name, succeeded to the management, under which the journal prospered. The second John Walter died in 1847, and his son John conducted the paper for many years. Of the staff mentioned in the text it may be said that Edward Sterling, the father of John Sterling, was an able man. Thomas Barnes was a vigorous writer on English politics in The Times, and was editor for a quarter of a century. Mr. Emerson notes that "Horace Twiss makes the 'parliamentary digest' for £700 a year." John Oxenford was the translator of Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe, and was a dramatic critic.

Journal, 1849. "The Times newspaper attracts the American in London more and more, until at last he wonders that it does not more pique the curiosity of the English themselves. …

"He never sees any person capable of writing these powerful paragraphs; and, though he hears up and down in society now and then some anecdote of a Mr. Bailey or Mr. Mosely who sent his paper to The Times, and received in return twenty guineas, with a request that he would write again, and so that he did, in due time, become one of the Staff of the Journal,—yet one never hears among well-informed men as Milnes, Carlyle, Helps, Gregg, Forster, any accounts of this potentate at all adequate to the fact.

"They may well affect not to know or care who wrote it, at the moment when I observe that all they know or say, they read in it."

Page 268, note 1. Hansard's Journal of the House of Commons from 1774.

Page 271, note 1. The recantation in Punch of its ridicule of Lincoln, after his assassination, in the fine poem by Taylor, was valued by Mr. Emerson. He included it in his Parnassus.

Page 271, note 2. The Times dared tell the British public in the war of 1812 the astounding news that within the year two of their frigates had been obliged to strike their flags in duels with vessels of the almost ignored American Navy. Captain Mahan quotes this leader in one of his magazine articles. It is one of the few recognitions, in English writings, of the actions at sea in that war.

Page 272, note 1. In 1863, while our country was struggling for life with foes at home, and the armed intervention of England on behalf of her trade was threatening, Mr. Emerson wrote, and probably spoke, thus: "We are coming (thanks to the war) to a nationality. Put down your foot and say to England, I know your merits and have paid them in the past the homage of ignoring your faults. I see them still. But it is time to say the whole truth,—that you have

failed in an Olympian hour, that when the occasion of magnanimity arrived, you had it not,—that you have lost character. Besides; your insularity, your inches are conspicuous, and they are to count against miles. When it comes to divide an estate, the politest men quarrel. Justice is above your aim. You are self-condemned."

XVI. STONEHENGE

Page 274, note 1. As a contrast of the tempers and teaching of the friends, the motto of Emerson's essay on Art, printed in the Poems, might be read.

Page 276, note 1. He wrote in the notebook on England and America, in 1856: "We read without pain what the English say to the advantage of England to the disparagement of America; for are not we the heir?

"'Percy is but the factor, good my lord.'"

Page 279, note 1. Choir Gaur, or Côr Gawr, meaning Giant's circle or temple, is only a British name for Stonehenge, derived from the Saxon Stanhengest.

Page 280, note 1. Early in the seventeenth century the Jesuits of Antwerp resolved to perpetuate the memory of the saints and martyrs of the Church by collecting and transcribing the records and traditions concerning them, and the work known as the Acta Sanctorum was begun by John Bolland and continued by various hands through two centuries.

Page 281, note 1. Algernon Herbert ("late of Merton College and the Inner Temple") in his work on Stonehenge, Cyclops Christianus, calls attention to the important fact that there is no accurate or approximate description of the structure by Roman authors, as there certainly would have been, had they existed during the Roman occupation. The British Bards, however, in the Triads speak of the Cor Emmrys (circle of Emmrys or Ambrosius) as one of the "three

mighty achievements of the Isle of Britain." He says that the native authors declare that "the great Cor was constructed in the latter days of Britain after the Roman Emperors had ceased to govern her," that is, in the fifth century after Christ.

Page 281, note 2. In the first edition Mr. Emerson quotes Stukeley as follows: "Connected with Stonehenge are an avenue and a cursus. The avenue is a narrow road of raised earth, extending 594 yards in a straight line from the grand entrance, then dividing into two branches, which lead, severally, to a row of barrows, and to the cursus,—an artificially formed flat tract of ground. This is half a mile northeast from Stonehenge, bounded by banks and ditches, 3036 yards long, by 110 broad."

Page 282, note 1. In this chapter four similar names are used to signify two places (both in Wiltshire), and Mr. Emerson in his notes fell into some confusion among them. Ambresbury, or Ambresberie, is the old name for Amesbury, which he visited. Abury is the old name for Avebury, and at this place is the largest circle of Druid stones which exists in England.

Page 285, note 1. Apparently the charm of the nameless stream made the visitor name it for the "sacred river" of Kubla Khan.

Page 286, note 1. The blood of the grim old Presbyterians stirred in the admirer of John Knox, and made him share their dislike for the organ,—

"The kist fu' o' whistles that mak's sic a cleiro."

Page 286, note 2. Arthur Helps, afterwards knighted, a genial and talented man, who, though busy in the service of the English government, found time for writing many books,

the best known of which are Friends in Council and The Spanish Conquest of America. Of him Mr. Emerson wrote to his wife: "One meets now and then here with wonderfully witty men, all-knowing, who have tried everything and have everything, and are quite superior to letters and science. What could they not if they only would? I saw such a one yesterday, with the odd name, too, of Arthur Helps."

Page 288, note 1. The friends were daily finding, now that they were together, the truth which Carlyle sadly wrote two years later: "I see what a great deep cleft divides us, in our way of practically looking at this world,—I see also (as probably you do yourself) where the rock-strata, miles deep, unite again; and the two poor souls are at one." Fortunately apart, each for the rest of his life could remember "there is still a brother-soul left to me alive in this world, and a kind thought surviving far over the sea!"1 5.7

On the voyage home Mr. Emerson wrote in the cabin some "Sea-weeds" to send to a valued friend in Boston. In these the story of his quiet presentation to the two good Britons, Carlyle and Helps, of the thoughts that were moving the best people in New England in that day, is told with more vivacity thus: "Two very good men, with whom I spent a Sunday in the country near Winchester lately, asked me if there were any Americans, if there were any who had an American idea? or what is it that thoughtful and superior men with us would have? Certainly I did not retort, after our country fashion, by defying them to show me one mortal Englishman who did not live from hand to mouth, but who saw his way. No, I assured them there were such monsters hard by the setting sun, who believed in a future such as was never a past, but if I should show it to them, they would

think French communism solid and practicable in comparison. So I sketched the Boston fanaticism of right and might without bayonets or bishops, every man his own king, and all coöperation necessary and extemporaneous. Of course my men went wild at the denying to society the beautiful right to kill and imprison. But we stood fast for milk and acorns, told them the musket-worship1 5.8 was perfectly well known to us, that it was an old bankrupt, but that we had never seen a man of sufficient valor and substance quite to carry out the other, which was nevertheless as sure as Copernican astronomy, and all heroism and invention must of course lie on this side. 'T is wonderful how odiously thin and pale this republic dances before blue bloodshot English eyes, but I had some anecdotes to bring some of its traits within their vision, and at last obtained a kind of allowance; but I doubt my tender converts are backsliding before this.—But their question which began the conversation was so dangerous that I thought of no escape but to this extreme and sacred asylum, and having got off for once through the precinct of the temple, I shall not venture into such company again, without consulting those same thoughtful Americans, whom their inquiry concerned."

XVII. PERSONAL

Page 291, note 1. Macbeth, Act V., Scene iii.

Page 293, note 1. He wrote from London:—

… "I attend Mr. Owen's lectures at the Royal College of Surgeons; Faraday, at the Royal Institution; Lyell, Sedgwick, Buckland, Forbes, I hear at the Geologic Society; and two nights ago I dined with the antiquaries, and discussed Shakspeare with Mr. Collier. Dr. Carpenter has shown me his microscopes, Sir Henry De la Bèche his geologic

museum, and I have really owed many valuable hours to the scientific bodies. Now the Picture Galleries are open, and I have begun to see pictures and artists."

It is interesting to see the eagerness with which Mr. Emerson sought facts from the workers in science, to translate into higher terms. He quotes Owen's utterances on palaeontology in "Poetry and Imagination," saying that every good reader will recall expressions or passages in works of pure science which have given him the same pleasure he seeks in the poets. In the same essay he finds delight in Faraday's "spherules of force," and in "Greatness" proudly claims for the brave scholar the right "to weigh Plato, judge Laplace, know Newton, Faraday, judge of Darwin, criticise Kant and Swedenborg, and on all these arouse the central courage or insight."1 5.9

On the opening page of Natural History of Intellect, Mr. Emerson says that his desire to enumerate the laws and powers of the intellect was incited by the masterly manner in which these same scientific men had presented those of matter.

Page 293, note 2. Joanna Baillie, the friend of Scott, authoress of ballads in Scottish dialect and of many dramatic pieces, was at the time of Mr. Emerson's visit in her ninetieth year. Lady Morgan, née Owenson in 1783, a bright young Irish lady, early won repute by her songs and tales, especially "The Wild Irish Girl." She married Sir Thomas Charles Morgan, and with him travelled and lived abroad many years, writing many books, and finished her days in London, where she was very popular in society. Mrs. Anna Jameson, the well-known writer on Art. Mrs. Mary Somerville, the active-minded and successful student of physics, physical geography, astronomy and microscopy. Herself

a remarkable example of what a woman could accomplish, she was one of the earliest champions of equal opportunities and rights for women.

Page 294, note 1. The inbred hostility of Wordsworth, as a Borderer, to the Scot, and his traditionary ally the Frenchman, is interesting, recalling the old ballad of the Marches,—

"God send the land deliverance Frae every reaving, riding Scot! We'll sune hae neither cow nor ewe, We'll sune hae neither staig nor stot!"

The name starred in the text by Mr. Emerson was Carlyle, as appears in the notebook.

Page 295, note 1. After speaking of the insularity of the English and their unwilling reception of ideas in science from foreign sources, Mr. Emerson notes:—

"So in literature and philosophy,—Plato has no readers in England, except as a Greek book. The expansive, the ideal tendency has no favor, but only the exact, the defining, the experimental. Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, is totally unknown in England. His translation of Plato is found in every public, and often in private libraries, in this country; never in England. I asked repeatedly among literary men for some account of him. But in vain. Poor Taylor in his day had insulted over the materiaism and superstition of the times, and the dreadful sterility of times in which he fell, and sadly said: 'There does not appear to be any living author besides myself, who has made the acquisition of the Platonic Philosophy the great business of his life without paying the smallest attention to the accumulation of wealth.' And the modern multitude, which he despised, avenged themselves by forgetting him. Coleridge and Wordsworth slowly and against all opposition

made their genius felt. Goethe was received with mean cavilling criticism in the leading journals, like the Edinburgh and Blackwood, and with supercilious silence by the rest. The German Philosophy has made few steps. The English hate transcendental ideas, like the mysticism of the Eastern philosophy and religion, and one may see it amusingly in the anxiety a late critic shows to absolve Taliessin, the Welsh Bard, from the imputation of such odious doctrines as the transmigration of souls. Materialism is much less offensive."

Page 297, note 1. Wordsworth's "Happy Warrior"

"Through the heat of conflict keeps the law In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw."

Page 298, note 1. With the best intentions on both sides, the meetings with the lights of England were a little disappointing. Mr. Emerson wrote in a letter:—

LONDON, MARCH 20, 1848.

… What shall I say to you of Babylon? … There is nowhere so much wealth of talent and character and social accomplishment; every star outshone by one more dazzling, and you cannot move without coming into the light and fame of new ones. I have seen, I suppose, some good specimens, chiefly of the literary-fashionable and not of the fashionable sort. They have all carried the art of agreeable sensations to a wonderful pitch, they know everything, have everything, they are rich, plain, polite, proud and admirable. But though good for them, it ends in the using. I shall or should soon have enough of this play for my occasion. The seed-corn is oftener found in quite other districts. … Tennyson, whom I wish to see more than any other, is in Ireland, and I fear

I shall miss him. I saw Wordsworth to very good purpose in Westmoreland, and all the Scottish gods at Edinburgh. Perhaps it is no fault of Britain,—no doubt it is because I grow old and cold,—but no persons here appeal in any manner to the imagination. I think even that there is no person in England from whom I expect more than talent and information. But I am wont to ask very much more of my benefactors,—expansions that amount to new horizons.1 6.1

XVIII. RESULT

Page 300, note 1. In some sheets on English Civilization, evidently from a lecture given on his return, he writes:—

"Very intellectual people and very silent people, inaccessible on every other topic, grew garrulous on politics. 'Festus' Bailey I found only entertained by politics. Every man gives the same attention to public affairs as the Prime Minister. The whole British public read the Times newspaper with the punctuality with which they eat."

And again: "'English principles' mean monopoly of all kinds, forcing the Colonies, forcing Ireland to buy of England only; suppressing manufactures in Ireland and the Colonies; allowing freedom of conscience, but you must take the oaths to the English Church and State, if you will enter Parliament, the University, the Army, the professions, or the government—freedom of conscience certainly, build what chapel you like, but you must pay your tithe to the Anglican. Lord Eldon resists abolition of Slavery; resists Catholic Emancipation; resists Reform of Parliament; resists Reform in Chancery; resists Jewish franchise; resists abolishing impressment of seamen, 'which is the life of our navy;' resists abolishing capital punishment for small offences; too speculative to be safe; resists strikes or any attempt on the part of operatives to obtain

increase of wages; resists West Indian Emancipation—'English principles' mean with a primary view to the interests of property."

Page 301, note 1. From the notebook:—

"English Politics. Sir James Graham opened the letters of Mazzini. In 1837 Lord John Russell usurped the Constitutional functions of the Colonial Assemblies in Canada. In 1831 Lord Palmerston pronounced the rights of the Czar over Poland incontestable; in 1849, refused to allow the Roman patriots to land in Malta."

As an instance of the spirit of British trade in dealing with the outside world, he mentions the inscription on the statue of Lord Chatham in the Guildhall in London, which records that, "under his administration, Commerce had been united with and made to flourish by War."

Remembering the brutal element in the Anglo-Saxon stock on both sides of the Atlantic, he writes:—

"In that country as in this, they want great men, and the cause of right can only succeed against this gravitation or materialism by means of immense personalities. But Webster, Calhoun, Clay, Benton, are not found to be philanthropists but attorneys of gross interests."

But Mr. Emerson recognizes their hopeful advance among the other nations.

"They have exceeded the humanity of other governments. Cheap postage they have adopted. Free Trade they have adopted. Reform Bill passed. Emancipation of Negroes, Abolition of Slave Trade. Impeachment of Hastings—Dissenters Bill. Exploring Expeditions—Elgin Marbles; Nineveh excavations: British Museum; the government is gentlemanlike. If any national benefit has been rendered, if arts have been advanced, science served, the government may be

relied on to be just and generous to the man who has served them,—Paxton, Fellowes, Stephenson, Franklin, Rowland Hill. The power of England goes to show that domesticity is the tap-root which enables a nation to branch wide and high. They are the most humane of nations. Their rules and usages in War are distinguished by humanity. They spare the conquered. They will not fire on an enemy when they might hit their own men: the French will. They respect towns and private property."

Page 304, note 1. Here is an instance of the immediate use on another plane of a scientific generalization of John Hunter, which Mr. Emerson had probably heard from Richard Owen,—the electric word, as he calls it in the essay on "Poetry and Imagination" in Letters and Social Aims.

Page 304, note 2. Fran&c;cedil;ois Huber of Geneva, having become blind, devoted himself with his wife to the study of bees and wrote Nouvelles Observations sur les Abeilles.

Mr. Emerson felt that the Englishmen, even more than the Americans of his generation, were, for the time, in the bonds of materialism, but that, as he had written in his "Self-Reliance," it was true of them, as of all:—

"If they are honest and do well, presently their neat new pinfold will be too strait and low, will crack, will lean, will rot and vanish, and the immortal light, all young and joyful, million-orbed, million-colored, will beam over the universe as on the first morning."

XIX. SPEECH AT MANCHESTER

Page 309, note 1. George Cruikshank, the caricaturist, who used his art not merely to amuse, for he was an eager liberal and reformer. Of his illustrations of Dickens's novels I find this mention in the journal:—

"Alcott told me that, when he saw Cruikshank's drawings, he thought him a fancy caricaturist, but when he went

to London, he saw that he drew from nature, without any exaggeration. Selection is his exaggeration."

Mr. Alcott, it is certain, would have known nothing of Cruikshank but for his daughters' delight in Dickens, and their modelling their "make-up" on these pictures in acting scenes from Dickens.

Page 311, note 1. This was the theme of a lecture, "Natural Aristocracy," which the sight of the contrast of feudal privilege and utter misery in England had impelled him to write there and deliver in London.

Page 312, note 1. Mr. Emerson, finding life so beautiful that all days were, or should be, holidays, took little interest in these as such. When any one would remember that the day was the anniversary of some occurrence, he would jestingly say, "Oh, it is always a hundred years from something."

Page 314, note 1. Mr. Emerson breathed freer as he turned towards his own country. He writes:—

"Boundless freedom of America in the North. … The American mind is not written in books, but on the land and in the institutions and inventions."

Of America he wrote from England to Margaret Fuller Ossoli, then in Italy:—

"The goods of that country are original and incommunicable to this—I see that well. It would give me no pleasure to bring valued persons thence and show them to valued persons here, but lively pleasure to show to these last those friends at home in their own place. … I leave England with an increased respect for the Englishman. His stuff or substance seems to be the best of the world. I forgive him all his pride. My respect is the more generous that I have no sympathy with him, only an admiration."

From such mentions of English Traits as I have come upon, by their own authors, the book, with its praise and blame, appears to have been taken entirely in good part. Dr. Richard Garnett, in his Life of Emerson, says:—

"In this book he has matched himself with the English people, and both are upon their trial. Could an idealist display true insight in dealing with so practical a nation? Could so material a civilization stand the criticism of an idealist? England and Emerson both came well out of the ordeal."

Notes

• 1 1.1

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, his Life, Genius and Writings; A Biographical Sketch. London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1882.
• 1 1.2

  Dimidiate is difficult to render in English. It may mean diminished, or in miniature, or refer to the fact that Terence borrowed freely from Menander
• 1 1.3

  This pamphlet of twenty pages of comment on some five pages of English Traits may be found reprinted in Literary Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century, vol. ii., edited by W. Robertson Nicoll, M. A., LL. D., and Thomas J. Wise. London, 1896.
• 1 2.1

  For the whole passage on Coleridge, see Mr. Cabot's Memoir of Emerson, p. 161.
• 2 2.2

  A Correspondence between John Sterling and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
• 1 3.1

  From the Germania of Tacitus (xxxvii), translated by R. B. Townshend, M. A. London, 1894.
• 1 3.2

  This anecdote I copy from a book in which Mr. Emerson wrote out the story more fully than in the little notebook. The comment of Agassiz was evidently added later, inserted with a caret. It seems very possible that it was not a "whale-ship," but the "Slave Ship" now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
• 1 5.1

  Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem.

  Horace, Art Poetica, 180.

  In speaking of theatrical representations, and the comparative effect on the spectator of things seen, or merely narrated by an actor, Horace explains that things addressed to the ear rouse the feelings more slowly than those presented to the eye.
• 1 5.2

  Green's Short History of the English People.
• 1 5.3

  Correspondence between John Sterling and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1897.
• 1 5.4

  Correspondence of Emerson and Sterling.
• 1 5.5

  See Cabot's Memoir of Emerson, vol. ii. p. 133; also his Prefatory Note to Natural History of Intellect.
• 1 5.6

  Cabot's Memoir of Emerson, vol. ii. p. 478.
• 1 5.7

  Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, vol. ii. p. 187.
• 1 5.8

  Mr. John Forster, at a recent dinner-party, had "called Carlyle's passion 'musket-worship.'"
• 1 5.9

  Letters and Social Aims.
• 1 6.1

  Letters of Emerson to a Friend. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1899.