"A Fable for Critics" is less consciously ambitious and more mature. Just how remarkable a piece of discrimination it was can be seen from a comparison of the writers criticized in it with those in Poe's "Literati" of two years earlier. Lowell's subjects are familiar to the modern general reader; he omitted no man of permanent reputation and included almost no one who has been forgotten. Poe's selections, on the other hand, are quaintly unfamiliar as a whole to all but the professed student of literary history. His judgments on them are mostly sound, but his judgment in choosing them for treatment is open to one of two criticisms: either that he could not recognize permanent values or that, for personal and editorial reasons, he preferred to ignore them. In the "Fable" Lowell for the first time put to public use his ready command of impromptu verse. His pen was a little erratic, but when it would work at all, it was likely to work with happy fluency. The jaunty treatment of his contemporaries was quite literally a series of running comments, trotting along in genial anapæstic gait, stumbling sometimes on a pun, scampering with light foot across extended metaphors, and taking the barriers of double and triple rime without a sign of exertion. In point of method the "Fable" was a single exercise in writing the journalistic verse of which Lowell proved himself master in the two series of "Biglow Papers" (1846-1848 and 1862-1866). It was exactly deserving of Holmes's friendly comment, "I think it is capital--crammed full and rammed down hard--powder (lots of it)--shot--slugs--very little wadding, and that is guncotton--all crowded into a rusty-looking sort of a blunderbuss barrel, as it were--capped with a percussion preface--and cocked with a title-page as apropos as a wink to a joke." Different as it is from "The Literati" in scale, tone, individual subjects, and method of circulation, the two deserve mention together as antidotes both to Anglomania and to wholesale praise of everything American. With "The Biglow Papers" Lowell returned to the attack which he had begun in "The Present Crisis." He wrote in 1860: I believed our war with Mexico (though we had as just ground for it as a strong nation ever has against a weak one) to be essentially a war of false pretences, and that it would result in widening the boundaries and so prolonging the life of slavery.... Against these and many other things I thought all honest men should protest. I was born and bred in the country, and the dialect was homely to me. I tried my first "Biglow Paper" and found that it had a great run. So I wrote the others from time to time in the year which followed, always very rapidly, and sometimes (as with "What Mr. Robinson Thinks") at one sitting.