many guineas a
sheet, the temptation is very great to make one's contribution cover as
many sheets as possible. We all know the metallic taste of articles
written under this powerful stimulus. If Bacon's Essays had been
furnished by a modern hand to the "Quarterly Review" at fifty guineas a
sheet, what a great book it would have taken to hold them!

The first thing which suggests itself to me, as I contemplate my slight
project, is the liability of repeating in the evening what I may have
said in the morning in one form or another, and printed in these or other
pages. When it suddenly flashes into the consciousness of a writer who
had been long before the public, "Why, I have said all that once or
oftener in my books or essays, and here it is again; the same old
thought, the same old image, the same old story!" it irritates him, and
is likely to stir up the monosyllables of his unsanctified vocabulary.
He sees in imagination a thousand readers, smiling or yawning as they say
to themselves, "We have had all that before," and turn to another
writer's performance for something not quite so stale and superfluous.
This is what the writer says to himself about the reader.

The idiot! Does the simpleton really think that everybody has read all
he has written? Does he really believe that everybody remembers all of
his, writer's, words he may happen to have read? At one of those famous
dinners of the Phi Beta Kappa Society; where no reporter was ever
admitted, and which nothing ever leaks out about what is said and done,
Mr. Edward Everett, in his after-dinner speech, quoted these lines from
the AEneid, giving a liberal English version of them, which he applied to
the Oration just delivered by Mr. Emerson:

Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosae
Addiderant, rutili tres ignis, et alitis Austri.

His nephew, the ingenious, inventive, and inexhaustible. Edward Everett
Hale, tells the story of this quotation, and of the various uses to which
it might plied in after-dinner speeches. How often he ventured to repeat
it at the Phi Beta Kappa dinners I am not sure; but as he reproduced it
with his lively embellishments and fresh versions and artful
circumlocutions, not one person in ten remembered that he had listened to
those same words in those same accents only a twelvemonth ago. The poor
deluded creatures who take it for granted that all the world remembers
what they have said, and laugh at them when they say it over a