Many finer touches have become obscure by the lapse of time, and _The Biglow Papers_ is now provided with historical notes; but the energy, the spirit, and the unfailing humor of the work are perennial. Lowell was most fortunate in his verbal felicities. Who could have foreseen that so much danger lurked in a middle initial, or that a plain name of the sort borne by the former senator from Middlesex contained such comic potentialities? We were gittin’ on nicely up here to our village, With good old idees o’ wut’s right an’ wut aint, We kind o’ thought Christ went agin war an’ pillage, An’ thet eppyletts worn’t the best mark of a saint; But John P. Robinson he Sez this kind o’ thing’s an exploded idee. Lowell was surprised at his own success. What he at first thought ‘a mere fencing stick’ proved to be a weapon. The blade was two-edged, and the Yankees did well to fall back a little when he lifted it against the enemy. For in writing _The Biglow Papers_ Lowell took real delight in noting the oddities and laughing at the foibles of his own New Englanders, a people whom he loved with all tenderness, but to whose faults he was not in the least blind. In 1861 the little puppets were taken out of the box where they had lain for fifteen years and furbished up for a new tragi-comedy. The second series of _The Biglow Papers_ was read no less eagerly than the first had been. Quite as brilliant as their predecessors, the later poems are more impassioned, and in those touching on English hostility to the North the satire is bitterly stinging. While the numbers of the first series were in course of publication Lowell produced a rhymed primer of contemporary American literature under the title of _A Fable for Critics_. It was an improvisation, and therefore the buoyancy, the jovial off-hand manner, the impudence even, were a matter of course and all in its favor. Often penetrating and just in his criticisms, Lowell was invariably amusing, and in the cleverness of the rhyme and word play quite inimitable. Two months after the appearance of the _Fable_ the popular _Vision of Sir Launfal_ was published. Though undoubtedly read more for the sake of the preludes than for the slight but touching story, it is by no means certain that the preludes, brought out as independent poems, could have won the number of readers they now have. In other words, _The Vision of Sir Launfal_ has a unity which it seems on first acquaintance to lack. V _UNDER THE WILLOWS_, _THE CATHEDRAL_, _COMMEMORATION ODE_, _THREE MEMORIAL POEMS_, _HEARTSEASE AND RUE_