but he is explicit enough regarding them in the same letter to Mr. Briggs: I had a horrible visitation the other evening from Mr. ----, of Philadelphia, accompanied by Messrs. ---- and ----, of Boston. After their departure, I wrote the ‘digression on bores’ which I mentioned above. ----, I believe, likes my poetry, but likes his own too well to appreciate anybody’s else. He is about to start a magazine and has issued a prospectus of the very most prodigious description. One would think it to have been written with a quill plucked from the wing of ‘our country’s bird.’ He wished to have a portrait and memoir of me in his first number. I escaped from the more immediate crucifixion, however, on the ground that I had no sketch of myself that would answer his purpose. As his project may fail after the first number, I may get off altogether. I have sometimes given offence by answering such applications with a smile, so I have changed my tactics, and give assent.... I hope to finish the ‘Fable’ next week.” On 24 July, Lowell wrote to Gay, who was in the secret, that he had finished the “Fable,” and shortly after he made a visit to New York, but it was not till near the end of August that he sent the last instalment of copy. The proof followed, and Lowell took occasion to make at least one omission, due apparently to better knowledge which led him to revise his judgment. He was too late, apparently, for another correction, for he wrote to Briggs, 4 October, asking him to strike out the four lines relating to Miss Fuller, beginning “There is one thing she owns in her own single right,” which still stand. The poem was printed from type, so that as each sheet was printed, and the type distributed, it was not possible, as in the case of electrotype plates, to make corrections up to the last moment before printing the entire book. In the same letter he writes:-- “I send half the proof to-day--t’ other to-morrow with Irving and Judd. I am _druv like all possessed_. I am keeping up with the printers with Wilbur’s Notes, Glossary, Index, and Introduction. I have two sets of hands to satiate, one on the body of the book, one on the extremities. “I wish to see title-page and preface. Also, be sure and have a written acknowledgment from G. P. P. that the copyright remains with _you_. Then send me a transfer of it for value received. I will endorse in such a way that it shall remain to you and yours in case anything happen to me. Don’t think my precaution indelicate. I only wish to provide against accidents. Let Putnam take out copyright and let it stand in your name as far as he and the rest of the world are concerned. I am anxious about it (I need scarcely say) solely on these two accounts, that it may never fall into strangers’ hands, and that it may never be taken from you. More to-morrow.”