less public occasions the American
Minister was called upon to say the fitting word; and he deserves the
quaint praise which Thomas Benton bestowed upon Chief Justice Marshall, as
"a gentleman of finished breeding, of winning and prepossessing talk, and
just as much mind as the occasion required him to show." I cannot think
that Lowell spoke any better when unveiling a bust in Westminster Abbey
than he did at the Academy dinners in Ashfield, Massachusetts, where he had
Mr. Curtis and Mr. Norton to set the pace; he was always adequate, always
witty and wise; and some of the addresses in England, notably the one on
"Democracy" given in Birmingham in 1884, may fairly be called epoch-making
in their good fortune of explaining America to Europe. Lowell had his
annoyances like all ambassadors; there were dull dinners as well as
pleasant ones, there were professional Irishmen to be placated, solemn
despatches to be sent to Washington. Yet, like Mr. Phelps and Mr. Bayard
and Mr. Choate and the lamented Walter Page in later years, this gentleman,
untrained in professional diplomacy, accomplished an enduring work. Without
a trace of the conventional "hand across the sea" banality, without either
subservience or jingoism, he helped teach the two nations mutual respect
and confidence, and thirty years later, when England and America essayed a
common task in safeguarding civilization, that old anchor held.

This cumulative quality of Lowell's achievement is impressive, as one
reviews his career. His most thoughtful, though not his most eloquent
verse, his richest vein of letter-writing, his most influential addresses
to the public, came toward the close of his life. Precocious as was his
gift for expression, and versatile and brilliant as had been his
productiveness in the 1848 era, he was true to his Anglo-Saxon stock in
being more effective at seventy than he had been at thirty. He was one of
the men who die learning and who therefore are scarcely thought of as dying
at all. I am not sure that we may not say of him to-day, as Thoreau said of
John Brown, "He is more alive than ever he was." Certainly the type of
Americanism which Lowell represented has grown steadily more interesting to
the European world, and has revealed itself increasingly as a factor to be
reckoned with in the world of the future. Always responsive to his
environment, always ready to advance, he faced the new political issues at
the close of the century with the