The idiot! Does the simpleton really think that everybody has read all
he has written? Does he really believe that everybody remembers all of
his, writer's, words he may happen to have read? At one of those famous
dinners of the Phi Beta Kappa Society; where no reporter was ever
admitted, and which nothing ever leaks out about what is said and done,
Mr. Edward Everett, in his after-dinner speech, quoted these lines from
the AEneid, giving a liberal English version of them, which he applied to
the Oration just delivered by Mr. Emerson:

Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosae
Addiderant, rutili tres ignis, et alitis Austri.

His nephew, the ingenious, inventive, and inexhaustible. Edward Everett
Hale, tells the story of this quotation, and of the various uses to which
it might plied in after-dinner speeches. How often he ventured to repeat
it at the Phi Beta Kappa dinners I am not sure; but as he reproduced it
with his lively embellishments and fresh versions and artful
circumlocutions, not one person in ten remembered that he had listened to
those same words in those same accents only a twelvemonth ago. The poor
deluded creatures who take it for granted that all the world remembers
what they have said, and laugh at them when they say it over again, may
profit by this recollection. But what if one does say the same
things,--of course in a little different form each time,--over her? If
he has anything to say worth saying, that is just what he ought to do.
Whether he ought to or not, it is very certain that this is what all who
write much or speak much necessarily must and will do. Think of the
clergyman who preaches fifty or a hundred or more sermons every year for
fifty years! Think of the stump speaker who shouts before a hundred
audiences during the same political campaign, always using the same