Emerson met Brigham Young at Salt Lake City, as has been mentioned, but neither seems to have made much impression upon the other.  Emerson spoke of the Mormons.  Some one had said, “They impress the common people, through their imagination, by Bible-names and imagery.”  “Yes,” he said, “it is an after-clap of Puritanism.  But one would think that after this Father Abraham could go no further.”

The charm of Boswell’s Life of Johnson is that it not merely records his admirable conversation, but also gives us many of those lesser peculiarities which are as necessary to a true biography as lights and shades to a portrait on canvas.  We are much obliged to Professor Thayer therefore for the two following pleasant recollections which he has been good-natured enough to preserve for us, and with which we will take leave of his agreeable little volume:—­

“At breakfast we had, among other things, pie.  This article at breakfast was one of Mr. Emerson’s weaknesses.  A pie stood before him now.  He offered to help somebody from it, who declined; and then one or two others, who also declined; and then Mr.——­; he too declined.  ‘But Mr.——!’ Mr. Emerson remonstrated, with humorous emphasis, thrusting the knife under a piece of the pie, and putting the entire weight of his character into his manner,—­’but Mr.——­, what is pie for?’”

A near friend of mine, a lady, was once in the cars with Emerson, and when they stopped for the refreshment of the passengers he was very desirous of procuring something at the station for her solace.  Presently he advanced upon her with a cup of tea in one hand and a wedge of pie in the other,—­such a wedge!  She could hardly have been more dismayed if one of Caesar’s cunei, or wedges of soldiers, had made a charge against her.

Yet let me say here that pie, often foolishly abused, is a good creature, at the right time and in angles of thirty or forty degrees.  In semicircles and quadrants it may sometimes prove too much for delicate stomachs.  But here was Emerson, a hopelessly confirmed pie-eater, never, so far as I remember, complaining of dyspepsia; and there, on the other side, was Carlyle, feeding largely on wholesome oatmeal, groaning with indigestion all his days, and living with half his self-consciousness habitually centred beneath his diaphragm.

Like his friend Carlyle and like Tennyson, Emerson had a liking for a whiff of tobacco-smoke:—­

“When alone,” he said, “he rarely cared to finish a whole cigar.  But in company it was singular to see how different it was.  To one who found it difficult to meet people, as he did, the effect of a cigar was agreeable; one who is smoking may be as silent as he likes, and yet be good company.  And so Hawthorne used to say that he found it.  On this journey Mr. Emerson generally smoked a single cigar after our mid-day dinner, or after tea, and occasionally after both.  This was multiplying, several times over, anything that was usual with him at home.”

Professor Thayer adds in a note:—­