ll of them were one of his pieties. He had written from
Elmwood in 1861: "I am back again in the place I love best. I am sitting in
my old garret, at my old desk, smoking my old pipe and loving my old
friends." That is the way book-lovers still picture Lowell--the Lowell of
the "Letters"--and though it is only a half-length portrait of him, it is
not a false one. He drew upon his ripe stock of reading for his college
lectures, and from the lectures, in turn, came many of the essays. Wide as
the reading was in various languages, it was mainly in the field of
"belles-lettres." Lowell had little or no interest in science or
philosophy. Upon one side of his complex nature he was simply a book-man
like Charles Lamb, and like Lamb he was tempted to think that books about
subjects that did not interest him were not really books at all.

Recent critics have seemed somewhat disturbed over Lowell's scholarship. He
once said of Longfellow: "Mr. Longfellow is not a scholar in the German
sense of the word--that is to say, he is no pedant, but he certainly is a
scholar in another and perhaps a higher sense. I mean in range of
acquirement and the flavor that comes with it." Those words might have been
written of himself. It is sixty-five years since Lowell was appointed to
his professorship at Harvard, and during this long period erudition has not
been idle here. It is quite possible that the University possesses to-day a
better Dante scholar than Lowell, a better scholar in Old French, a better
Chaucer scholar, a better Shakespeare scholar. But it is certain that if
our Division of Modern Languages were called upon to produce a volume of
essays matching in human interest one of Lowell's volumes drawn from these
various fields, we should be obliged, first, to organize a syndicate, and,
second, to accept defeat with as good grace as possible.

Contemporary critics have also betrayed a certain concern for some aspects
of Lowell's criticism. Is it always penetrating, they ask? Did he think his
critical problems through? Did he have a body of doctrine, a general thesis
to maintain? Did he always keep to the business in hand? Candor compels the
admission that he often had no theses to maintain: he invented them as he
went along. Sometimes he was a mere guesser, not a clairvoyant. We have had
only one Coleridge. Lowell's essay on Wordsworth is not as illuminating as
Walter Pater's. The essay on Gray is not as well ordered as Arnold's. The
es