first to his tongue were simple, energetic, and picturesque. When he wrote for publication, he did his sentences out of English into Johnsonese. His letters from the Hebrides to Mrs. Thrale are the original of that work of which the Journey to the Hebrides is the translation; and it is amusing to compare the two versions. "When we were taken up-stairs," says he in one of his letters, “a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed on which one of us was to lie." This incident is recorded in the Journey, as follows: "Out of one of the beds on which we were to repose started up, at our entrance, a man black as a Cyclops from the forge." Sometimes Johnson translated aloud. "The Rehearsal," he said, very unjustly, "has not wit enough to keep it sweet; " then, after a pause, "it has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction."

Mannerism is pardonable, and is sometimes even agreeable, when the manner, though vicious, is natural. Few readers, for example, would be willing to part with the mannerism of Milton or of Burke. But a mannerism which does not sit easy on the mannerist, which has been adopted on principle, and which can be sustained only by constant effort, is always offensive; and such is the mannerism of Johnson.

As we close this book,2 the club-room is before us, and the table on which stands the omelet for Nugent, and the lemons for Johnson. There are assembled those

1 The Rehearsal, a comedy written by the Duke of Buckingham and others, and first produced in 1671.

2 this book: that is, Boswell's Life of Johnson.

8 the club-room. See the sketch of Burke, page 196.

heads which live for ever on the canvas of Reynolds. There are the spectacles of Burke, and the tall, thin form of Langton; the courtly sneer of Beauclerk, and the beaming smile of Garrick ; Gibbon tapping his snuffbox, and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his ear. In the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought up, the gigantic body, the huge massy face seamed with the scars of disease, the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the gray wig with the scorched foretop, the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see the eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy form rolling; we hear it puffing; and then comes the "Why, sir!" and the "What then, sir?" and the "No, sir;" and the "You don't see your way through the question, sir!"

What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man! To be regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours as a companion! To receive from his contemporaries that full homage which men of genius have in general received only from posterity! To be more intimately known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries! That kind of fame which is commonly the most transient is, in his case, the most durable. The reputation of those writings, which he probably expected to be immortal, is every day fading; while those peculiarities of manner and that careless table-talk, the memory of which, he probably thought, would die with him, are likely to be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe.

XIII. -RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

LIFE AND WORKS.

THE life of a scholar is seldom eventful, and that of the poet-philosopher of Concord was little marked by the vicissitudes that make the stir and movement of biography. His life was indeed but the unfolding of his spiritual nature,—an unfolding placid, beautiful, as the development of a flower. Of his external experiences, the most marked were his three visits to Europe. The grand climacteric of his year was the winter lecture-tour: for the rest, his days were measured by thought-beats, and Lowell wittily gives us a specimen of his intellectual calendar in the supposed jotting, “October: - Indian Summer: now is the time to get in your early Vedas."

Emerson's fame, his acceptance by the public, was of a like gentle, almost imperceptible growth. At his first appearance, forty or more years ago, people rubbed their eyes to see what manner of man he could be. To the hard-heads of New England he was both a stumbling-block and foolishness, with his doctrine of transcendentalism and the "over-soul," and his magiclantern pictures on the mist; while even those who were not mere hard-heads could not forbear asking, "Who is this propounder of Sphinx riddles?"

As the years passed, however, he came to be understood, first a little, then better, then sympathetically, till in all our centers of culture he had a select following; and all fine-brained and aspiring young men,

whether in college-hall or on frontier outpost, began to feel the quickening impulse of this seer, whose doctrine was the doctrine of "plain living and high thinking." The circle of his inspiration widened with the years; he came to be understood and loved; and when on a spring day of 1882 he died, it was felt that there had passed away one of the finest spirits that ever took on the garb of flesh.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born May 28, 1803, in Boston, where his father, Rev. William Emerson, was pastor of the First Congregational Church. If there is any thing in hereditary influence that prophesies a man's career, Emerson was marked out for the ministry, seeing that for eight generations there had been a clergyman in the family, either on the paternal or maternal side. His father, previously to his removal to Boston, had been pastor of a flock in Concord; and when he died, the lad Ralph Waldo, then seven years old, was taken to that town, and lived in the old manse from the study-window of which his father had witnessed the Concord fight.

After receiving his scholastic training at Harvard College, from which he was graduated in 1821, Emerson entered the Divinity School, and on the completion of his studies began the ancestral profession. In 1826 he was "approbated to preach," and from 1829 to 1832 he was colleague of Henry Ware of the Second Unitarian Church of Boston; but then his ministerial career closed, and he quitted the pulpit to devote himself to a life of thought and letters.

When he was thirty years old Emerson made his

first visit to England. Writing later of this visit he says, "It was mainly the attraction of three or four writers, of whom Carlyle was one, that led me to Europe." That great man, then unknown and unrecognized, was nourishing his mighty genius in a lonely cottage on the heathery hill-side of a Scottish hamlet. Thither Emerson turned aside to find the hermit student; and there began that friendship which lasted during the lifetime of the two men, and gave rise to one of the most interesting interchanges of correspondence in literary history. "I shall never forget the visitor," wrote Mrs. Carlyle long afterwards, “who years ago in the desert descended on us out of the clouds, as it were, and made one day there look like enchantment for us, and left me weeping that it was only one day."

On his return from Europe Emerson fixed his residence at Concord, where in his "sylvan home" he led a quiet, retired, meditative life, cheered and sustained by the love, honor, and reverence of his townsmen. Here and thus it was he passed the subsequent fortyseven years of his life, the even tenor of which was interrupted only by his winter lecture-tours. For it was as a lecturer that he found his true vocation; and even his books were for the most part the fruit of meditations first given forth to living audiences.

Lovers and companions, too, he had in Concord,—the beautiful-souled Channing; Thoreau, the diviner of bird and plant; Orphic Alcott; the sibyl spirit of Margaret Fuller; and Hawthorne, with his weird imaginings: while, as his fame enlarged, Concord became the