This address should be read in connection with the one on ‘The Times,’ which supplements it. The ideal reformer is not he who has some cause at heart in comparison with which all other causes are naught. The reformer is the ‘Re-maker of what man has made; a renouncer of lies, a restorer of truth and good, imitating that great Nature which embosoms us all, and which sleeps no moment on an old past.’ A reading of this address ought to be followed by a reading of the one entitled ‘The Conservative.’ As he had advised reformers of the danger to which they were exposed, he now warns conservatives not to forget that they are the retrograde party. By their theory of life sickness is a necessity and the social frame a hospital. Yet in a planet ‘peopled with conservatives one Reformer may yet be born.’ In the lecture on ‘The Transcendentalist’ Emerson comes to a tempered defence of his own. He defines the new movement; it is merely Idealism as it shows itself in 1840--an old thing under a new name. He is very patient with the Transcendentalists, whose chief idiosyncrasy is that they have ‘struck work.’ ‘Now every one must do after his kind, be he asp or angel, and these must.’ American literature and spiritual history will profit by the turmoil. This heresy will leave its mark, as any one will admit who knows ‘these seething brains, these admirable radicals, these talkers who talk the sun and moon away.’ V _THE ESSAYS_, _REPRESENTATIVE MEN_, _ENGLISH TRAITS_, _CONDUCT OF LIFE_ When the _Essays_ appeared, Emerson found a larger audience. He now spoke through the medium of a recognized literary form. If all readers do not read essays, they at least know what they are and stand in no fear of them. Some buyers may have been tempted by the table of contents. Titles such as ‘Self-Reliance,’ ‘Compensation,’ ‘Friendship,’ ‘Heroism,’ had an encouraging sound and promised useful advice. In the essay on ‘History,’ Emerson reaffirms the doctrine of the unity of human nature. There is ‘one mind,’ history is its record. What we possess in common with the men of the past enables us to comprehend and interpret the actions of the men of the past. The facts must square with our own experience. The theme is continued in ‘Self-Reliance.’ As there is one mind common to all men, and as what belongs to greatness of the Past belongs also to us, it is suicide to descend to imitation. ‘Speak your latent conviction and it shall become the universal sense.’ The whole essay is a glowing exhortation to men to live largely and stand on their own feet, facing the world with the nonchalance begotten of health, good humor, and the sense of possession.