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 



