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 arguments, illustrations, and catchwords!  Think of the editor, as Carlyle has pictured him, threshing the same straw every morning, until we know what is coming when we see the first line, as we do when we read the large capitals at the head of a thrilling story, which ends in an advertisement of an all-cleansing soap or an all-curing remedy!

The latch-key which opens into the inner chambers of my consciousness fits, as I have sufficient reason to believe, the private apartments of a good many other people’s thoughts.  The longer we live, the more we find we are like other persons.  When I meet with any facts in my own mental experience, I feel almost sure that I shall find them repeated or anticipated in the writings or the conversation of others.  This feeling gives one a freedom in telling his own personal history he could not have enjoyed without it.  My story belongs to you as much as to me.  De te fabula narratur.  Change the personal pronoun,—­that is all.  It gives many readers a singular pleasure to find a writer telling them something they have long known or felt, but which they have never before found any one to put in words for them.  An author does not always know when he is doing the service of the angel who stirred the waters of the pool of Bethesda.  Many a reader is delighted to find his solitary thought has a companion, and is grateful to the benefactor who has strengthened him.  This is the advantage of the humble reader over the ambitious and self-worshipping writer.  It is not with him pereant illi, but beati sunt illi qui pro nobis nostra dixerunt,-Blessed are those who have said our good things for us.