Timothy Dexter’s reputation as a vainglorious self-promoter outlived him by many decades. In 1863, almost sixty years after his death, he was mentioned in an essay called “Life Without Principle,” published in The Atlantic Monthly. The essayist was none other than Henry David Thoreau — who I think should have known better than to believe what people said about a fellow nonconformist. (He licks his own reputational wounds in the same essay: “If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer.”)

Anyway, the passage I’m referring to is part of Thoreau’s attempt to explain the difference between meaningful and meaningless work. He writes that he watched a neighbor struggle all morning to drive a team of oxen hauling a slab of stone across a field. “Honest, manly toil,” he thinks as the sweat drips from the man’s brow. But he has second thoughts when he discovers the purpose of the stone.

The day went by, and at evening I passed the yard of another neighbor, who keeps many servants, and spends much money foolishly, while he adds nothing to the common stock, and there I saw the stone of the morning lying beside a whimsical structure intended to adorn this Lord Timothy Dexter’s premises, and the dignity forthwith departed from the teamster’s labor, in my eyes.

To Henry David, and to his Atlantic readers, Dexter is simply a type, a name for an extravagant buffoon. But I have a feeling that if H.D. had ever come to old Newburyport and shared a pipe with Dexter in the Temple of Reason — the glass-enclosed tomb Dexter erected in his back yard as a place to sit and think about life and mortality — and if he had read Dexter’s book of homespun wisdom, A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, in a charitable enough frame of mind, he might have glimpsed a little of himself. Species recognition, we call it today.

Other than that, I have no complaints about “Life Without Principle.” Thoreau is refreshingly unrealistic — firing off zingers like “I do not need the police of meaningless labor to regulate me,” and “There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.” Do not read the rest of the essay, though. It will make you quit your job.