Herman Melville | snobs who burn their tuns of rancid fat |
Do not think, my boy, that because I, impulsively broke forth in jubillations over... Shakspeare, that, therefore, I am of the number of the snobs who burn their tuns of rancid fat at his shrine. No, I would stand afar off and alone, and burn some pure Palm oil, the product of some overtopping trunk.—I would to God Shakspeare had lived later, & promenaded in Broadway... that the muzzle which all men wore on their souls in the Elizebethan days, might not have intercepted Shakspers full articulations.
—Herman Melville, letter, 1849, from The Letters of Herman Melville, eds. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman, 1960
Library of Congress