In all these evidently unstudied and spontaneous expressions of his permanent feeling and conviction, Mr. Lowell claims our hearty consideration. His voice is everywhere and always loyal to his native land, which he loved and honored: to freedom, which he held above all price: to that liberty and civilization which it is the joint mission of England and America to maintain to the uttermost. Difference of methods between the two countries there may be: but the end to be reached is the same. To help reach this, Mr. Lowell gave his best energies. His words had a power beyond what he could have thought possible. If there is now, in England, a clearer appreciation of American ideas: less of that condescension which was once so evident in foreigners: more readiness to see and to seek the best rather than the worst in our modes of life and thought: a clearer understanding that, at heart, we are one people--a very large share of that improved condition is due to James Russell Lowell. The method of securing that better understanding was--not by denying or ignoring certain manifest short-comings or over-doings:--but by constantly holding up to the world the best we had done, or striven to do:--and, more than all, by illustrating it in his own person:--so that even our enemies were compelled to confess that there must be some good in our land, if such men as he were the “New birth of our new soil.” HENRY STONE. BOSTON, January 1, 1892. American Ideas for English Readers. I. BEFORE THE EDINBURGH PHILOSOPHICAL INSTITUTION. On Saturday evening, November 6, 1880, the directors of the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution entertained Mr. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, American Minister, at dinner in the Balmoral Hotel in that city. Dr. W. Smith, senior vice-president of the institution, occupied the chair, and among others present were the Earl of Rosebery, Lord Reay, Principal Sir Alexander Grant, the Rev. Professor Flint, and Professor Blackie. Mr. LOWELL, in returning thanks for the toast of his health, said: He thought that they in America had done quite their share of work in their short life, although he was always inclined to question the statement that they were a young people. It was supposed, somehow or other, that they were autochthonic; that they had sprung from the earth of America, as the Athenians were said to have done from the soil of Attica. But it was nothing of the kind. If he might be allowed to say so, they began where those in this country left off. It must be remembered that they took with them all the traditions of English freedom and of English civilization, and that they not only maintained them, but, in his humble judgment, carried them further. (_Cheers._) Mr. LOWELL concluded by referring to early association on his part with Edinburgh.