perhaps makes a Western General Taylor of the very tailor who cut and stitched it and had tossed it over carelessly a hundred times.... In the same way this contrivance of ours, though the work of our own hands, has acquired a superstitious potency in our eyes. The vitality of the state has been transferred from the citizens to this. Were a sacrilegious assault made upon it, our whole body politic would collapse at once. Gradually men are beginning to believe that, like the famous _ancile_ at Rome, it fell down from heaven, and it is possible that it may have been brought thence by a distinguished personage who once made the descent. Meanwhile our Goddess of Liberty is never allowed to go abroad without the holy parasol over her head to prevent her from being tanned, since any darkening of complexion might be productive of serious inconvenience in the neighborhood of the Capitol.” With this grave banter Lowell goes on to instance cases where the Sacred Parasol has caused a shifting of relations in the twilight created by it, and warns people of the danger they would be in if exposed to the direct rays of the Sun of Righteousness. The article shows the kind of reënforcement which Lowell brought to the anti-slavery camp. Edmund Quincy had something of the same wit and irony, but he had also a greater love of detail and busied himself over current incidents with the eagerness of a political detective, running down fugitives from divine justice with an ardor which was always heightened by the complexities of the case. Lowell, though he did not neglect to use incidents for the illustration of his argument, never got far away from the elemental principles for which his wit and sense of justice and love of freedom stood. He played with his subject often, but it was the play of a cat with his captive--one stroke of the paw, when the time came, and the mouse was dead. Meanwhile the little band of the faithful, for whom the _Anti-Slavery Standard_ was a weekly rally, read with delight the incisive editorial articles, and though they were not always supplied with downright arguments from this source, they had, what they scarcely got otherwise in the midst of their tremendous seriousness, the opportunity to rub their hands with glee over a telling rapier thrust, and also to have their horizon suddenly enlarged by the historical and literary comparisons which were swept into range by this active-minded scout.