sm and no relaxing of his hold, no decay of his faith,
while the nobleness of his tone, the chivalry of his utterance, is even
more marked than at first. Better a hundred-fold than his praise of fine
manners is the delicacy and courtesy and the grace of generous breeding
displayed on every page. Why does one grow impatient and vicious when
Emerson writes of fine manners and the punctilios of conventional life,
and feel like kicking into the street every divinity enshrined in the
drawing-room? It is a kind of insult to a man to speak the word in his
presence. Purify the parlors indeed by keeping out the Choctaws, the
laughers! Let us go and hold high carnival for a week, and split the
ears of the groundlings with our "contemptible squeals of joy." And when
he makes a dead set at praising eloquence, I find myself instantly on
the side of the old clergyman he tells of who prayed that he might never
be eloquent; or when he makes the test of a man an intellectual one, as
his skill at repartee, and praises the literary crack shot, and defines
manliness to be readiness, as he does in this last volume and in the
preceding one, I am filled with a perverse envy of all the confused and
stammering heroes of history. Is Washington faltering out a few broken
and ungrammatical sentences, in reply to the vote of thanks of the
Virginia legislature, less manly than the glib tongue in the court-room
or in the club that can hit the mark every time? The test of a wit or of
a scholar is one thing; the test of a man, I take it, is quite another.
In this and some other respects Emerson is well antidoted by Carlyle,
who lays the stress on the opposite qualities, and charges his hero to
hold his tongue. But one cheerfully forgives Emerson the way he puts his
thumb-nail on the bores. He speaks feelingly, and no doubt from as deep
an experience as any man in America.

I really hold Emerson in such high esteem that I think I can safely
indulge myself in a little more fault-finding with him.

I think it must be admitted that he is deficient in sympathy. This
accounts in a measure for his coolness, his self-possession, and that
kind of uncompromising rectitude or inflexibleness that marks his
career, and that he so lauds in his essays. No man is so little liable
to be warped or compromised in any way as the unsympathetic man.
Emerson's ideal is the man who stands firm, who is unmoved, who never
laughs, or apologizes, or deprecates, or makes concessio