Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[54] selected by the readers of the Pall Mall Gazette are equal, taken together, to the French Academicians. ‘You do not know them, you say?’he goes on. ‘That is not a sufficient reason. The English, and all who speak English, know them well, but, on the other hand, know little of our men of letters.’ After this a French paper, reprinting a similar English list, added comments on the names, like this: ‘Robert Browning, the Scotch poet.’ There is probably no better manual of universal knowledge than the great French dictionary of Larousse. When people come with miscellaneous questions to the Harvard College librarians, they often say in return, ‘Have you looked in Larousse?’Now, when one looks in Larousse to see who Robert Browning was, one finds the statement that the genius of Browning is more analogous to that of his American contemporaries ‘Emerton, Wendell Holmes, and Bigelow’ than to that of any English poet (celle de n'importe quel poete anglais.) This transformation of Emerson into Emerton, and of Lowell, probably, to Bigelow, is hardly more extraordinary than to link together three such