Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Caleb Colton

Colton is skewering a social reflex: in real time, we don t evaluate work so much as we evaluate the worker. The living are surrounded by the noise of personality - charm, scandal, connections, class, looks, the soft bribery of proximity. That is what "contemporaries" can actually access. Merit, by contrast, is slow to reveal itself; it requires distance, comparison, and the unglamorous labor of rereading.

The line turns on a cold inversion. Today, the person functions like a lens that distorts the thing they made. Later, the person becomes a footnote, and the thing is forced to stand alone. Colton isn t claiming posterity is wiser in some moral sense; he is describing a different information environment. When the parties are dead, the dinner table gossip dies with them. What remains is the artifact: the argument, the melody, the theorem, the sentence that still works. Time becomes an editor that cuts biography down to a few searchable facts.

The subtext has teeth for a writer in the early 19th century, when patronage, reputation, and polite society could make or break a career. Colton is both consoling and warning his peers: do not mistake applause for quality, and do not confuse being liked with being good. The sting is that injustice runs both ways. The mediocre can be inflated by charisma in the moment, while the genuinely meritorious can be ignored until their name is no longer attached to an inconvenient body.