man judgments on the least desirable of
his new acquaintances as his friend Carlyle has left as a bitter legacy
behind him. Carlyle's merciless discourse about Coleridge and Charles
Lamb, and Swinburne's carnivorous lines, which take a barbarous
vengeance on him for his offence, are on the level of political rhetoric
rather than of scholarly criticism or characterization. Emerson never
forgot that he was dealing with human beings. He could not have long
endured the asperities of Carlyle, and that "loud shout of laughter,"
which Mr. Ireland speaks of as one of his customary explosions, would
have been discordant to Emerson's ears, which were offended by such
noisy manifestations.

During this visit Emerson made an excursion to Paris, which furnished
him materials for a lecture on France delivered in Boston, in 1856, but
never printed.

From the lectures delivered in England he selected a certain number for
publication. These make up the volume entitled "Representative Men,"
which was published in 1850. I will give very briefly an account of its
contents. The title was a happy one, and has passed into literature and
conversation as an accepted and convenient phrase. It would teach us a
good deal merely to consider the names he has selected as typical,
and the ground of their selection. We get his classification of men
considered as leaders in thought and in action. He shows his own
affinities and repulsions, and, as everywhere, writes his own biography,
no matter about whom or what he is talking. There is hardly any book of
his better worth study by those who wish to understand, not Plato, not
Plutarch, not Napoleon, but Emerson himself. All his great men interest
us for their own sake; but we know a good deal about most of them, and
Emerson holds the mirror up to them at just such an angle that we
see his own face as well as that of his hero, unintentionally,
unconsciously, no doubt, but by a necessity which he would be the first
to recognize.

Emerson swears by no master. He admires, but always with a reservation.
Plato comes nearest to being his idol, Shakespeare next. But he says of
all great men: "The power which they communicate is not theirs. When we
are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to
which also Plato was debtor."

Emerson loves power as much as Carlyle does; he likes "rough and
smooth," "scourges of God," and "darlings of the human race." He likes
Julius Caesar, Charles the