8.  Thus, all originality is relative.  Every thinker is retrospective.  The learned member of the legislature, at Westminister,[571] or at Washington, speaks and votes for thousands.  Show us the constituency, and the now invisible channels by which the senator is made aware of their wishes, the crowd of practical and knowing men, who, by correspondence or conversation, are feeding him with evidence, anecdotes, and estimates, and it will bereave his fine attitude and resistance of something of their impressiveness.  As Sir Robert Peel[572] and Mr. Webster[573] vote, so Locke[574] and Rousseau[575] think for thousands; and so there were foundations all around Homer,[576] Menu,[577] Saada,[578] or Milton,[579] from which they drew; friends, lovers, books, traditions, proverbs,—­all perished,—­which, if seen, would go to reduce the wonder.  Did the bard speak with authority?  Did he feel himself overmatched by any companion?  The appeal is to the consciousness of the writer.  Is there at last in his breast a Delphi[580] whereof to ask concerning any thought or thing whether it be verily so, yea or nay? and to have answer, and rely on that?  All the debts which such a man could contract to other wit, would never disturb his consciousness of originality:  for the ministrations of books, and of other minds, are a whiff of smoke to that most private reality with which he has conversed.

9.  It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius, in the world, was no man’s work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse.  Our English Bible[581] is a wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the English language.  But it was not made by one man, or at one time; but centuries and churches brought it to perfection.  There never was a time when there was not some translation existing.  The Liturgy,[582] admired for its energy and pathos, is an anthology of the piety of ages and nations, a translation of the prayers and forms of the Catholic church,—­these collected, too, in long periods, from the prayers and meditations of every saint and sacred writer all over the world.  Grotius[583] makes the like remark in respect to the Lord’s Prayer, that the single clauses of which it is composed were already in use, in the time of Christ, in the rabbinical forms.[584] He picked out the grains of gold.  The nervous language of the Common Law,[585] the impressive forms of our courts, and the precision and substantial truth of the legal distinctions, are the contribution of all the sharp-sighted, strong-minded men who have lived in the countries where these laws govern.  The translation of Plutarch gets its excellence by being translation on translation.  There never was a time when there was none.  All the truly idiomatic and national phrases are kept, and all others successively picked out, and thrown away.  Something like the same process had gone on, long before, with the originals of these books.  The world takes