in 1872. With one exception (that on "Poetry and
Nationalism" which formed the greater part of a review of the poems of
Howells's friend Piatt), all the articles from these two magazines,
reprinted in this volume, appeared during Lowell's editorship. These
articles include reviews of poems by his friends Longfellow and
Whittier. And in his review of "The Courtship of Miles Standish," Lowell
makes effective use of his scholarship to introduce a lengthy and
interesting discourse on the dactylic hexameter.

While we are on the subject of the New England poets a word about the
present misunderstanding and tendency to underrate them may not be out
of place. Because it is growing to be the consensus of opinion that the
two greatest poets America has produced are Whitman and Poe, it does not
follow that the New-Englanders must be relegated to the scrap-heap. Nor
do I see any inconsistency in a man whose taste permits him to enjoy
both the free verse and unpuritanic (if I may coin a word) poems of
Masters and Sandburg, and also Whittier's "Snow-Bound" and Longfellow's
"Courtship of Miles Standish." Though these poems are not profound,
there is something of the universal in them. They have pleasant
school-day memories for all of us and will no doubt have such for our
children.

Lowell's cosmopolitan tastes may be seen in his essays on men so
different as Thackeray, Swift, and Plutarch. Hardly any one knows that
he even wrote about these authors. Lowell preferred Thackeray to
Dickens, a judgment in which many people to-day no longer agree with
him. As a young man he hated Swift, but he gives us a sane study of him.
The review of Plutarch's "Essays" edited by Goodwin, with an
introduction by Emerson, is also of interest.

The last essay in the volume on "A Plea for Freedom from Speech and
Figures of Speech-Makers" shows Lowell's satirical powers at their best.
Ferris Greenslet tells us, in his book on Lowell, that the Philip Vandal
whose eloquence Lowell ridicules is Wendell Phillips. The essay gives
Lowell's humorous comments on various matters, especially on
contemporary types of orators, reformers, and heroes. It represents
Lowell as he is most known to us, the Lowell who is always ready with
fun and who set the world agog with his "Biglow Papers."

Lowell's work as a critic dates from the rare volume "Conversations on
Some of the Old Poets," published in 1844 in his twenty-fifth year,
includes his best-known volumes "Amon