Another eminent American who often honoured my quiet home at Oxford was James Russell Lowell, for a time United States Minister in England. He was a Professor and at the same time a politician and a man of the world. Few essays are so brimful of interesting facts and original reflections as his essays entitled “Among my Books.” His “Biglow Papers,” which made him one of the leading men in the United States, appeal naturally to American rather than to Cosmopolitan readers. But in society he was at home in England as much as in America, in Spain as well as in Holland. I came to know him first as a sparkling correspondent, and then as a delightful friend. Here is the letter which began our intimacy:— LEGACION DE NOS ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EN ESPANA. _18th Jan. 1880._ I read with great satisfaction what you wrote about _jade_.[12] One is tempted to cry out, with Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, “How now, ye pampered jades of Asia!” One thing in the discussion has struck me a good deal, and that is, the crude notion which intelligent men have of the migration of tribes. I think most men’s conception of distance is very much a creature of maps—which make Crim Tartary and England not more than a foot apart, so that the feat of the old rhyme—“to dance out of Ireland into France,” looks easy. They seem to think that the shifting of habitation was accomplished like a modern journey by rail, and that the emigrants wouldn’t need tools by the way or would buy them at the nearest shop after their arrival. There is nothing the ignorant and the poor cling to so tenaciously as their familiar household utensils. Incredible things are brought every day to America in the luggage of emigrants—things often most cumbrous to carry and utterly useless in the new home. Families that went from our seaboard to the West a century ago, through an almost impenetrable wilderness, carried with them all their domestic pots and pans—even those, I should be willing to wager, that needed the tinker. I remember very well the starting of an expedition from my native town of Cambridge in 1831, for Oregon, under the lead of a captain of great energy and resource. They started in waggons ingeniously contrived so as to be taken to pieces, the body forming a boat for crossing rivers. They carried everything they could think of with them, and got safely to the other side of the continent, as hard a job, I fancy, as our Aryan ancestors had to do. There is hardly a family of English descent in New England that doesn’t cherish, as an heirloom, something brought over by the first ancestors two hundred and fifty years ago. And besides the motive of utility there is that also of sentiment—particularly strong in the case of an old tool.