[20] See Bliss Perry's "Park Street Papers," "The Editor who Never was Editor," pp. 205-277. An unpremeditated bit in one of his letters shows how the mind of professor and literary editor reverted to the excitement of politics on the eve of the war. It is in a fragment of burlesque on the type of love story submitted to the _Atlantic_: "Meanwhile the elder of the two, a stern-featured man of some forty winters, played with the hilt of his dagger, half drawing and then sheathing again the Damascus blade _thin as the eloquence of Everett and elastic as the conscience of Cass_." From 1858 to 1866 he printed some sixteen vigorous and substantial political articles, besides many shorter notes and reviews, and during the latter four years resumed the "Biglow Papers," repeating and building upon his original success. The aggressive fighting spirit which he carried into the discussion of definite men and measures did not blind him to the permanent values of the matters in dispute. The consequence was that his political writings were limited to the Civil War only in the facts he cited, and that they apply to any war in the principles to which he appealed. There is no better illustration than "Mason and Slidell: a Yankee Idyll." In this the Concord Bridge and Bunker Hill Monument bring the spirit of the Revolution to the discussion of a Civil War issue, and between them they utter almost all the basic contentions of the World War which broke out fifty years later. They anticipate the vital things that have recently been said for and against military preparedness, international jealousies, the changes made necessary in international law by the progress of invention, the appeals to national hatred and to a tribal or national God, the viciousness of an indeterminate peace, and the essential values of democracy.