To Emerson, at this moment, numbers looked with the deepest admiration or with fiercest hate. He was the type of his age, what Carlyle might perhaps call its 'Priest Vates.' In his _Essays_ he stood aloft and proclaimed, 'In me is the kernel of truth: eat and live!' But the shell that enclosed the kernel was hard to crack, and was, moreover, like the 'Sileni' of the old French apothecaries, as described by Rabelais, so decorated with wondrous figures, harpies, satyrs, horned geese and bridled hares, that men were incredulous, and doubted that precious ambergris, musk and gems were to be found within. In his first crudities, fyttes and tilts with thought, both knight and field are covered with a cloth of gold so dazzling that the crystalline lenses of our common vision are in danger of dissolution, and we vainly hope for page or dame who will whisper to us the magic word that shall dispel this scene of enchantment. Meanwhile, his sentences, like arrows, darken that sun, himself, and we hasten with bits of smoked glass to view the eclipse. Happily, we have chosen the right medium: the luminousness is destroyed, but the opaqueness remains visible. Entrenched behind a mannerism so adroitly constructed as at once to invite and repel invasion, Emerson hurls out axioms and establishes precedents that prove upon examination to be either admirably varnished editions of old truths or statements of new ones of questionable legitimacy. Turn over leaf by leaf these early essays, and doubts arise as to the validity of the author's claim to originality. Carlyle has led before these pompous parades of moral truths that your child recognizes in the nursery when he makes war upon Johnny, who has knocked down his ten-pins. The law of compensation and the existence of evil and consequent suffering are actual entities to him. And yet these men do not belong to the same school. The resemblance is on the surface. Emerson dabbles delicately, yet, let it be conceded, energetically, with theories: his hands are not the nervy, sinewy hands of the Viking of English literature; he lacks his keen discernment of life, his quick comprehension of the mutual relations of men and their times; he often wants his fine analytical power. Carlyle sees in the life of a man his actions, associations, aspirations, disappointments, successes, what deep principles swayed him, what noble or ignoble nature provided his impulses, and wrought his manhood: Emerson tests him by the great problems of the universe, as he understands them, and educes from their application to certain circumstances the character of the man. The one is sagacious, argus-eyed; the other oracular, sibylline. And yet Emerson, perhaps unconsciously, through admiration of the liberal views and unquestioned bravery of his contemporary, adopted something like his peculiarities of style and domesticated foreign idioms, that yet, like tamed tigers, are not to be relied on in general society. As Carlyle was