This text is part of:
[52]
of Philadelphia, then a youth of twenty-one.
In this book occurs the sentence: ‘Byron's European fame is the best earnest of his immortality, for a foreign nation is a kind of contemporaneous posterity.’1
Few widely quoted phrases have had, I fancy, less foundation.
It is convenient to imagine that an ocean or a mountain barrier, or even a line of custom houses, may furnish a sieve that shall sift all true reputations from the chaff; but in fact, I suspect, whatever whims may vary or unsettle immediate reputations on the spot, these disturbing influences are only redistributed, not abolished, by distance.
Whether we look to popular preference or to the judgment of high authorities, the result is equally baffling.
Napoleon Bonaparte preferred Ossian, it is said, to Shakespeare; and Voltaire placed the latter among the minor poets, viewing him at best as we now view Marlowe, as the author of an occasional mighty line.
It was after Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu had been asked to hear Voltaire demolish Shakespeare at an evening party in Paris that she made her celebrated answer,
1 II. 89.
Boston, Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1892.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.