134 INDOOR STUDIES 



great man of letters, because he had not a genius and 

 instinct for style; his style had not the requisite 

 wholeness of good tissue. Who were the great men 

 of letters? They were Plato, Cicero, Voltaire, La 

 Bruyere, Milton, Addison, Swift, — men whose 

 prose is by a kind of native necessity true and 

 sound. Emerson was not a great philosopher, be- 

 cause he had no constructive talent, — he could not 

 build a system of philosophy. What, then, was his 

 merit 1 He was to be classed with Marcus Aurelius, 

 who was "the friend and aider of those who would 

 live in the spirit." This was Emerson's chief 

 merit and service: he was the friend and aider of 

 those who would live in the spirit. The secret of 

 his influence was not in his thought; it was in his 

 temper, his unfaltering spirit of cheerfulness and 

 hope. 



In the opinion of the speaker, even Carlyle was 

 not a great writer, and his work was of much less 

 importance than Emerson's. As Wordsworth's po- 

 etry was the most important work done in verse in 

 our language during the nineteenth century, so 

 Emerson's essays were, in the lecturer's view, the . 

 most important work done in prose. Carlyle was 

 not a great writer, because he was too impatient, too 

 willful, too vehement; he did not work his material 

 up into good literary form. 



In his essay on Joubert, Arnold says, following 

 a remark of Sainte-Beuve, that as to the estimate 

 of its own authors every nation is the best judge 

 (the positive estimate, not the comparative, as regards 



