Salmagundi; or, The whim-whams and opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, esq. [pseud.] and others. By William Irving, James Kirke Paulding and Washington Irving. Printed from the original ed., with a preface and notes by Evert A. Duyckinck.

A GREAT MAN. 309
we are determined to instruct our readers to the extent of our
abilities, and their limited comprehension, it may not be amiss
here to let them know what we understand by a great man.
First, therefore, let us-editors and kings are always pluralpremise, that there are two kinds of greatness: one conferred
by heaven-the exalted nobility of the soul-the other, a spurious distinction, engendered by the mob and lavished upon its
favorites. The former of these distinctions we have already contemplated with reverence; the latter, we will take this opportunity to strip naked before our unenlightened readers; so that if
by chance any of them are held in ignominious thralldom by this
base circulation of false coin, they may forthwith emancipate
themselves from such inglorious delusion.
It is a fictitious value given to individuals by public caprice,
as bankers give an impression to a worthless slip of paper: thereby
gaining it a currency for infinitely more than its intrinsic value.
Every nation has its peculiar coin, and peculiar great men;
neither of which will, for the most part, pass current out of the
country where they are stamped. Your true mob-created great
man, is like a note of one of the little New England banks, and
his value depreciates in proportion to the distance from home. In
England, a great man is he who has most ribands and gew-gaws
on his coat, most horses to his carriage, most slaves in his retinue, or most toad-eaters at his table; in France, he who can
most dexterously flourish his heels above his head-Duport is
most incontestably the greatest man in France!-when the
emperor is absent. The greatest man in China, is he who can
trace his ancestry up to the moon; and in this country, our
great men may generally hunt down their pedigree until it burrow in the dirt like a rabbit. To be concise: our great men are
those who are most expert at crawling on all fours, and have the