[Footnote 657:  A pilgrim’s progress.  As described by John Bunyan, the English writer, in his famous Pilgrim’s Progress.]

[Footnote 658:  Doleful histories of Adam’s fall, etc.  The subject of Paradise Lost, the great poem by John Milton.]

[Footnote 659:  With doomsdays and purgatorial, etc.  As described by Dante in his Divine Commedia, an epic about hell, purgatory, and paradise.]

PRUDENCE

[Footnote 660:  The essay on Prudence was given as a lecture in the course on Human Culture, in the winter of 1837-8.  It was published in the first series of Essays, which appeared in 1841.]

[Footnote 661:  Lubricity.  The word means literally the state or quality of being slippery; Emerson uses it several times, in its derived sense of “instability.”]

[Footnote 662:  Love and Friendship.  The subjects of the two essays preceding Prudence, in the volume of 1841.]

[Footnote 663:  The world is filled with the proverbs, etc.  Compare with this passage Emerson’s words in Compensation on “the flights of proverbs, whose teaching is as true and as omnipresent as that of birds and flies.”]

[Footnote 664:  A good wheel or pin.  That is, a part of a machine.]

[Footnote 665:  The law of polarity.  Having two opposite poles, the properties of the one of which are the opposite of the other.]

[Footnote 666:  Summer will have its flies.  Emerson discoursed with philosophic calm about the impediments and disagreeableness which beset every path; he also accepted them with serenity when he encountered them in his daily life.]

[Footnote 667:  The inhabitants of the climates, etc.  As a northerner, Emerson naturally felt that the advantage and superiority were with his own section.  He expressed in his poems Voluntaries and Mayday views similar to those declared here.]

[Footnote 668:  Peninsular campaign.  Emerson here refers to the military operations carried on from 1808 to 1814 in Portugal, Spain, and southern France against the French, by the British, Spanish, and Portuguese forces commanded by Wellington.  What was the “Peninsular campaign” in American history?]

[Footnote 669:  Dr. Johnson is reported to have said, etc.  Dr. Samuel Johnson was an eminent English scholar of the eighteenth century.  In this, as in many other instances, Emerson quotes from his memory instead of from the book.  The words of Dr. Johnson, as reported by his biographer Boswell, are:  “Accustom your children constantly to this; if a thing happened at one window, and they, when relating it, say it happened at another, do not let it pass, but instantly check them; you do not know where deviation from truth will end.”]

[Footnote 670:  Rifle.  A local name in England and New England for an instrument, on the order of a whetstone, used for sharpening scythes; it is made of wood, covered with fine sand or emery.]