r fellow, this is too bad. _I_ am
monopolizing _you_." Now and then, at rather rare intervals, when time
and place, and company and surroundings, were altogether suitable, Mr.
Browning would consent to appear in his true character and to delight
his hearers by speaking of his art. Then the higher and rarer qualities
of his genius came into play. He kindled with responsive fire at a
beautiful thought, and burned with contagious enthusiasm over a phrase
which struck his fancy. Yet all the while the poetic rapture was
underlain by a groundwork of robust sense. Rant, and gush, and
affectation were abhorrent to his nature, and even in his grandest
flights of fancy he was always intelligible.

The late Mr. Lowell must certainly be reckoned among the famous talkers
of his time. During the years that he represented the United States in
London his trim sentences, his airy omniscience, his minute and
circumstantial way of laying down literary law, were the inevitable
ornaments of serious dinners and cultured tea-tables. My first encounter
with Mr. Lowell took place many years before he entered on his
diplomatic career. It was in 1872, when I chanced to meet him in a
company of tourists at Durham Castle. Though I was a devotee of the
_Biglow Papers_, I did not know their distinguished author even by
sight; and I was intensely amused by the air of easy mastery, the calm
and almost fatherly patronage, with which this cultivated American
overrode the indignant showwoman; pointed out, for the general benefit
of the admiring tourists, the gaps and lapses in her artistic,
architectural, and archaeological knowledge; and made mullion and
portcullis, and armour and tapestry the pegs for a series of neat
discourses on mediaeval history, domestic decoration, and the science of
fortification.

Which things are an allegory. We, as a nation, take this calm assurance
of foreigners at its own valuation. We consent to be told that we do not
know our own poets, cannot pronounce our own language, and have no
well-educated women. But after a time this process palls. We question
the divine right of the superiority thus imposed on us. We ask on what
foundation these high claims rest, and we discover all at once that we
have paid a great deal of deference where very little was deserved. By
processes such as these I came to find, in years long subsequent to the
encounter at Durham, that Mr. Lowell, though an accomplished politician,
a brilliant writer