that Emerson might have looked down on Henry Adams but from a point of view remote from that indicated by Adams:
"I do not forgive in any man this forlorn pride, as if he were an Ultimus Romanorum. I am more American in my feelings. This country is full of people whose fathers were judges, generals, and bank presidents, and if all their boys should give themselves airs thereon and rest henceforth on the oars of their fathers' merit, we should be a sad hungry generation. Moreover, I esteem it my best birthright that our people are not crippled by family and official pride, that the best broadcloth coat in the country is put off to put on a blue frock, that the best man in town may steer his plough-tail or may drive a milk-cart. There is a great deal of work in our men, and a false pride has not yet made them idle or ashamed. Moreover, I am more philosophical than to love this retrospect. I believe in the being God, not in the God that has been. I work; my fathers may have wrought or rested. What have I to do with them, or with the Fellatahs, or the great Khan! I know a worthy man who walks the streets with silent indignation as a last of his race, quite contemptuously eyeing the passing multitude."
Emerson goes farther than that in welcoming the "new man," the power without known antecedents. In a notable passage of his Journal for 1845, one sees him, as it were, shaking off the dust
