The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Letters and social aims [Vol. 8]

do the book too much honor, reading out of it better things than the author wrote,—reading, as we say, between the lines. You have had the like experience in conversation: the wit was in what you heard, not in what the speakers said. Our best thought came from others. We heard in their words a deeper sense than the speakers put into them, and could express ourselves in other people's phrases to finer purpose than they knew. In Moore's Diary, Mr. Hallam is reported as mentioning at dinner one of his friends who had said, "I don't know how it is, a thing that falls flat from me seems quite an excellent joke when given at second hand by Sheridan. I never like my own bon-mots until he adopts them." Dumont was exalted by being used by Mirabeau, by Bentham and by Sir Philip Francis, who, again, was less than his own "Junius"; and James Hogg (except in his poems Kilmeny and The Witch of Fife) is but a third-rate author, owing his fame to his effigy colossalized through the lens of John Wilson,—who, again, writes better under the domino of "Christopher North" than in his proper clothes. The bold theory of Delia Bacon, that Shakspeare's plays were written by a society of wits,—by Sir Walter Raleigh, Lord Bacon and others around the

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Title: The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Letters and social aims [Vol. 8]
Author: Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882.
Canvas: Page 197
Publication: Boston ; New York :: Houghton, Mifflin,; [1903-1904].

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Full citation: "The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Letters and social aims [Vol. 8]." In the digital collection The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. https://name.umdl.umich.edu/4957107.0008.001. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections. Accessed June 12, 2025.

The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Letters and social aims [Vol. 8]

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