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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 10: Favorites of a day (search)
ir power of producing quotable passages on which their names may float. No one can help noticing the number of pages occupied by Pope, for instance, in every dictionary of quotations — a number quite out of proportion to his real ability or fame. The same was formerly true of Young's Night Thoughts and Thomson's Seasons, now rarely opened. Many of the most potent thinkers, on the other hand, are in the position of that General Clive, once famous for his wealth and gorgeous jewelry, whom Walpole excused for alleged parsimony on the ground that he probably had about him no small brilliants. In these various ways a man sometimes escapes, perhaps forever, from the personal renown that should seemingly be his. Even if he gains this, how limited it is, at the best! Strictly speaking, there is no literary fame worth envying, save Shakespeare's-and Shakespeare's amounted to this, that Addison wrote An Account of the Greatest English Poets in which his name does not appear; and that, o
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 28: the really interesting people (search)
hed, although both have done much, is more essentially interesting than this early interchange of life-work. Fortunately for all concerned, there is always a period, even in America, when the young look with a certain admiration and envy on the old, and sometimes, for five minutes at a time, would even change places with them. The old discreetly hold their tongues and accept the sort of supremacy thus forced upon them. So long as they say nothing, the mistaken impression stands. Sir Robert Walpole, who lived to be nearly eighty, remarked of his coeval, Lord Tyrawley, Tyrawley and I have been dead for two years, but we don't tell anybody. Long before reaching that point it occurs to most persons that, after all, the world belongs to the young, and not to those who seem to control it; the elders have still the nominal ownership, but they are only, as the phrase is, tenants by the courtesy, and in a few days or hours the whole governing body will be essentially different. In some