It is not alone in history, however, that New England's thoroughgoing admiration for herself has served to disturb the attainment of truth by the rising generation of Americans. Besides exaggerating the comparative influence of New England in the affairs of the country, they have exaggerated the place of favorite New England authors in the literature of the world to such a degree that growing young America cannot help but have a number of false notions of comparative literary values, which he has to rid himself of before he is able to attain any proper appreciation of world literature or even of English literature. A little group of New England literary folk came into prominence about the middle of the nineteenth century. Because they were the best that New England could produce, {451} apparently they were considered by New Englanders as the best in the world. English critics, of course, laughed at their self-complacency, but our New England schoolmasters took New England's writers so seriously and proceeded to write so much about them and make them so much the subject of teaching not alone in New England but in every part of the country, that now it is almost impossible to get our people to accept any true standards, since admiration for these quite unimportant New England writers has ruined any proper critical literary appreciation. As a consequence our rising generations for some time have been inclined to take Emerson seriously as a great philosopher, writer and thinker. They have been very prone to accept dear old Oliver Wendell Holmes, kindliest of men, charmingest of writers, as a great literary man. There have literally been hundreds of English writers such as these in the past three centuries of English literary history, who now take up at most but a few lines in even large histories of English literature. Taking Emerson seriously is fortunately going out of fashion. If one wanted a criterion of the depth of thought of the generation that accepted him originally and passed him along as a significant philosophic prophet, then surely one need go no farther. Our optimistic Carlyle, writing in a minor key, looms up so much smaller now than a generation ago that we can readily realize how {452} New Englandism infected literary and philosophic standards. What is thus said of Emerson may be repeated, with perhaps a little less emphasis, of the other writers whom New England has insisted on proclaiming to the world as representative of all that was best and highest in literature--because for a moment they commanded attention in New England.