Yet how emphatically Mr. Gay valued Lowell’s contributions appears from all the letters of that anxious and harassed editor. Near the close of the connection, he wrote to Lowell: “I expected much good for the paper when I proposed that you should lighten my editorial labor, but it has received, I know, far more benefit than I looked for, great as that was. The influence of the _Standard_--leaving myself out of the question--since it was established has been very great, and it would also, I am sure, have been very famous had its aim been other than it was. No small amount of energy and intellect have been bestowed upon it, and its nursing fathers and mothers have taken good care of its being. But of this I am sure, and nobody else is in a position to know it so well as I--that of all the good things ever done for it, no one so good ever was done, as making you its joint editor. Its influence through you has been felt where it never was before. Through you it has a reputation which in all its previous existence it had failed to gain. A respect and regard is accorded to it because of your efforts, which no other person ever had, and no other person probably would ever have gained for it.” But the _Standard_ was not Mr. Gay’s paper to do with as he would, and there was a section of the committee in control that was impatient of a contributor who was not as they were, fighting away on foot, with stout oak staves in their hands, but was flying about as a sort of light-horse contingent, and sometimes seemed out of sight and yet not in the enemy’s country. “There is a small class,” Mr. Gay wrote,--“Stephen Foster is a good representative of it,--who did not consider you worth much, and many of whom confess they do not understand what you would be at.” The portrait which Lowell had drawn of Stephen Foster in his letter to Mr. McKim is likely to help the reader understand that he might possibly even feel contempt for Lowell’s indirect method of attacking slavery. “Hard by, as calm as summer even, Smiles the reviled and pelted Stephen, The unappeasable Boanerges To all the Churches and the Clergies. * * * * * A man with caoutchouc endurance, A perfect gem for life insurance, A kind of maddened John the Baptist, To whom the harshest word comes aptest, Who, struck by stone or brick ill-starred, Hurls back an epithet as hard, Which, deadlier than stone or brick, Has a propensity to stick. His oratory is like the scream Of the iron-horse’s frenzied steam Which warns the world to leave wide space For the black engine’s swerveless race.”