ons being the third estate. During the French
Revolution the Third Estate, or Tiers Etat, asserted its rights and
became a powerful factor in French politics, choosing its own leaders
and effecting the downfall of its oppressors.]

[Footnote 21: Restorers of readings. Men who spend their lives trying
to improve and correct the texts of classical authors, by comparing
the old editions with each other and picking out the version which
seem most in accordance with the authors' original work.]

[Footnote 22: Emendators. The same as restorers of readings.]

[Footnote 23: Bibliomaniacs. Men with a mania for collecting rare and
beautiful books. Not a bad sort of mania, though Emerson never had any
sympathy for it.]

[Footnote 24: To many readers Emerson's own works richly fulfill this
obligation. He himself lived continually in such a lofty mental
atmosphere that no one can come within the circle of his influence
without being stimulated and elevated.]

[Footnote 25: Genius, the possession of a thoroughly active soul,
ought not to be the special privilege of favorites of fortune, but the
right of every sound man.]

[Footnote 26: They stunt my mental growth. A man should not accept
another man's conclusions, but merely use them as steps on his upward
path.]

[Footnote 27: If you do not employ such talent as you have in original
labor, in bearing the mental fruit of which you are capable, then you
do not vindicate your claim to a share in the divine nature.]

[Footnote 28: Disservice. Injury.]

[Footnote 29: In original composition of any sort our efforts
naturally flow in the channels worn for us by the first dominating
streams of early genius. The conventional is the continual foe of all
true art.]

[Footnote 30: Emerson is continually stimulating us to look at things
in new ways. Here, for instance, at once the thought comes: "Is it not
perhaps possible that the transcendent genius of Shakespeare has been
rather noxious than beneficent in its influence on the mind of the
world? Has not the all-pervading Shakespearian influence flooded and
drowned out a great deal of original genius?"]

[Footnote 31: That is,--when in his clear, seeing moments he can
distil some drops of truth from the world about him, let him not waste
his time in studying other men's records of what they have seen.]

[Footnote 32: While Emerson's verse is frequently unmusical, in his
prose we often find passages like this instinct with the fai