EMERSON 177 
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 clergy- 
man 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 un- 
_ grammatical 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 
