Self-Reliance that would become "Self-Reliance" was presented by Ralph Waldo Emerson as part of a sermon in September 1830 a month after his first marriage. His wife Ellen was sick with tuberculosis and, as Emerson's biographer Robert D. Richardson wrote, "Immortality had never been stronger or more desperately needed!" From 1836 into 1837, Emerson presented a series of lectures on the philosophy of history at Boston's Masonic Temple. These lectures were never published separately, but many of his thoughts in these were later used in "Self-Reliance" and several other essays. Later lectures by Emerson led to public censure of his radical
Critical and Historical Essays (Macaulay) name. Over the next twenty years he became one of their most regular and most popular reviewers, and his success in this line helped to promote his rise in politics. In 1843 he was persuaded to collect his reviews in book form, and the "Critical and Historical Essays" were duly published by Longman in three volumes. Macaulay restricted the collection to his contributions to the "Edinburgh Review", and left out some of these also, especially those which he thought were of ephemeral interest or which personally attacked former political enemies. "Critical and Historical Essays" was from the first a successful