Not everyone loved Emerson.............

Algernon Charles Swinburne by William Bell Scott

Faithful readers will understand this blogger's fascination with
Ralph Waldo Emerson.  It was with great interest that I read
this passage in Brand Blanshard's book Four Reasonable Men:

"It came to the notice of Swinburne that Emerson has said
something critical of him in an American paper.....The angry
poet sat down and wrote the philosopher a letter describing
him as a 'gap-toothed and hoary-headed ape, carried at
first into notice on the shoulder of Carlyle, and who now in
his dotage spits and chatters from a dirtier perch in his own 
finding and fouling:  coryphaeus or choragus of his Bulgarian
tribe of autocophagous baboons, who make the filth they
feed on'...."

Besides sending me to the dictionary to look up a few words,
this passage led me to the Oracle That Is Wikipedia to learn
more about Swinburne.  You can read it yourself here, or just
take comfort in this quote:


However, (T.S) Eliot disliked Swinburne's prose. About this 
he wrote "the tumultuous outcry of adjectives, the 
headstrong rush of undisciplined sentences, are the index to 
the impatience and perhaps laziness of a disorderly mind."


And we think what passes for our current political conversation
is too harsh and personal.  It has ever been thus.