ry.

In 1846, accordingly, the _Biglow Papers_ began to appear in the
_Boston Courier_, and were collected and published in book form in
1848. These were a series of rhymed satires upon the government and
the war party, written in the Yankee dialect, and supposed to be the
work of Hosea Biglow, a home-spun genius in a down-east country town,
whose letters to the editor were indorsed and accompanied by the
comments of the Rev. Homer Wilbur, A.M., pastor of the First Church in
Jaalam, and (prospective) member of many learned societies. The first
paper was a derisive address to a recruiting sergeant, with a
denunciation of the "nigger-drivin' States" and the "Northern
dough-faces;" a plain hint that the North would do better to secede
than to continue doing dirty work for the South; and an expression of
those universal peace doctrines which were then in the air, and to
which Longfellow gave serious utterance in his _Occultation of Orion_.

"Ez for war, I call it murder--
There you hev it plain an' flat;
I don't want to go no furder
Than my Testyment for that;
God hez said so plump an' fairly,
It's as long as it is broad,
An' you've gut to git up airly
Ef you want to take in God."

The second number was a versified paraphrase of a letter received from
Mr. Birdofredom Sawin, "a yung feller of our town that was cussed fool
enuff to goe atrottin inter Miss Chiff arter a dram and fife," and who
finds when he gets to Mexico that

"This kind o' sogerin' aint a mite like our October trainin'."

Of the subsequent papers the best was, perhaps, _What Mr. Robinson
Thinks_, an election ballad, which caused universal laughter, and was
on every body's tongue.

The _Biglow Papers_ remain Lowell's most original contribution to
American literature. They are, all in all, the best political satires
in the language, and unequaled as portraitures of the Yankee character,
with its cuteness, its homely wit, and its latent poetry. Under the
racy humor of the dialect--which became in Lowell's hands a medium of
literary expression almost as effective as Burns's Ayrshire
Scotch--burned that moral enthusiasm and that hatred of wrong and
deification of duty--"Stern daughter of the voice of God"--which, in
the tough New England stock, stands instead of the passion in the blood
of southern races. Lowell's serious poems on political questions, such
as the _Present Crisis_, _Ode to Freedom_, and the _Capture of Fugi