Page:Studies of a Biographer 4.djvu/160

 Emerson was fond of reading books upon Napoleon. They were at any rate instructive documents in the study of character. The list of authors recommended in his lecture upon 'books' is characteristic. You must, of course, read the great poets. But his special favourites are, on one side, Plotinus and the Neoplatonists; and on the other, the books which give an insight into character. Plutarch, both the Lives and the Morals should be in the smallest library; Confessions and autobiographies, Augustine, Benvenuto Cellini, and Rousseau; the table-talks of Luther, or Selden, or Coleridge; and books of anecdotes are invaluable. Anybody, meanwhile, will do for history: Hume and Goldsmith as well as Gibbon. History represents merely the background in which the great lives are set; and what you should really want is to be brought into contact with inspiring minds, not to get up dates and external facts. Emerson is weak in criticism, if the critic is to give a judicial estimate of a man's proper position in the development of poetry or philosophy; but he can say most clearly and forcibly what is the message which any great writer has delivered to him personally.

This, I think, shows how one may approach