a lover and admirer of Emerson, speaks
very plainly of his limitations as a scholar.

"As he confesses in the Essay on 'Books,' his learning is second hand;
but everything sticks which his mind can appropriate. He defends the use
of translations, and I doubt whether he has ever read ten pages of
his great authorities, Plato, Plutarch, Montaigne, or Goethe, in the
original. He is certainly no friend of profound study any more than
of philosophical speculation. Give him a few brilliant and suggestive
glimpses, and he is content."

One correction I must make to this statement. Emerson says he has
"contrived to read" almost every volume of Goethe, and that he has
fifty-five of them, but that he has read nothing else in German, and has
not looked into him for a long time. This was in 1840, in a letter to
Carlyle. It was up-hill work, it may be suspected, but he could not well
be ignorant of his friend's great idol, and his references to Goethe are
very frequent.

Emerson's quotations are like the miraculous draught of fishes. I hardly
know his rivals except Burton and Cotton Mather. But no one would accuse
him of pedantry. Burton quotes to amuse himself and his reader; Mather
quotes to show his learning, of which he had a vast conceit; Emerson
quotes to illustrate some original thought of his own, or because
another writer's way of thinking falls in with his own,--never with
a trivial purpose. Reading as he did, he must have unconsciously
appropriated a great number of thoughts from others. But he was profuse
in his references to those from whom he borrowed,--more profuse than
many of his readers would believe without taking the pains to count his
authorities. This I thought it worth while to have done, once for all,
and I will briefly present the results of the examination. The named
references, chiefly to authors, as given in the table before me, are
three thousand three hundred and ninety-three, relating to eight hundred
and sixty-eight different individuals. Of these, four hundred and eleven
are mentioned more than once; one hundred and fifty-five, five times
or more; sixty-nine, ten times or more; thirty-eight, fifteen times or
more; and twenty-seven, twenty times or more. These twenty-seven names
alone, the list of which is here given, furnish no less than one
thousand and sixty-five references.

Authorities. Number of times mentioned.
Shakespeare.....112
Napoleon.........84
Plato............81
Plutar