The later volumes contain some of his most illuminating criticism (notably in the ‘Fielding,’ ‘Don Quixote,’ ‘Gray,’ ‘Walton,’ and ‘Landor’), and his style seems the perfection of ease and suppleness. Doubtless it is negligent now and then, but always with the winning negligence of a master in the difficult art of expression. VII _POLITICAL ADDRESSES AND PAPERS_ _The Anti-Slavery Papers_ consists of editorial articles reprinted from ‘The Pennsylvania Freeman,’ and ‘The Anti-Slavery Standard.’[68] Witty, ironical, and pungent, these fugitive leaves are of value for the light they throw on the history of the struggle maintained by the Abolitionists against their powerful enemies both in the North and in the South, as well as for the idea they give of the militant Lowell at a time when to conviction of the justness of the cause for which he fought was added a measure of joyousness in the mere act of fighting. Of greater significance is the volume of _Political Essays_, twelve papers written at intervals between 1858 and 1866. Designed for the most part to serve an immediate purpose, and betraying in every page the writer’s depth of feeling, intensity of patriotism, and strong but not bigoted Northern convictions, these essays, by their acuteness of insight, balanced judgment, admirable temper, and wealth of allusion, as well as by their literary flavor and their occasional eloquence, hold a permanent place not only among Lowell’s best writings but among the best of the innumerable political papers called out by the Civil War. Of Lowell’s later political utterances none is more notable than the address on ‘Democracy,’ delivered at Birmingham in 1884, a cleverly phrased and thoughtful speech in which the American minister defended the democratic idea with logic as adroit as it was sound. That the source of American democracy was the English constitution must have been news to a part at least of his English audience. It was a happy thought of Lowell’s to show how stable democracy might be as a system of government. He made the argument from expediency, that ‘it is cheaper in the long run to lift men up than to hold them down, and that a ballot in their hands is less dangerous to society than a sense of wrong in their heads.’ He would not have been Lowell had he not also shown that a democracy has its finer instincts, or failed to recognize the fact that as an experiment in the art of government it must stand or fall by its own merits. And the whole address is strongly optimistic, in its insistence that ‘those who have the divine right to govern will be found to govern in the end.’