It will be remembered that in December, 1846, Lowell wrote the amusing lines to James Miller McKim, editor of the _Pennsylvania Freeman_, which were printed in that paper, and are included among his collected poems under the heading “Letter from Boston.” In the same frolicsome temper used in “A Fable for Critics,” Lowell made rapid sketches of the conspicuous anti-slavery people as seen at the bazaar just held in Faneuil Hall. The success of the squib very likely suggested to him the fun of playing the same game with the literati of the day. Both poems, indeed, may have taken a hint from Leigh Hunt’s “The Feast of the Poets,”[73] which had been brought afresh to Lowell’s notice, if not disclosed to him for the first time, by the little volume “Rimini and other Poems by Leigh Hunt,” issued by Ticknor in 1844. The measure is the same. Phœbus Apollo also introduces the poets, though Hunt’s scheme is more deliberate than Lowell’s, and there is the same disposition to make use of unexpected rhymes. Hunt used his sauciness upon his contemporaries, Spencer, Rogers, Montgomery, Crabbe, Hayley, Gifford, Scott, Campbell, Moore, Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, and Rose. The reader can easily pick out the names here which have well outlived Hunt’s mockery, and those which were as well known to Hunt’s contemporaries as are some in the “Fable” to Lowell’s. Hunt, to be sure, confined himself to poets and poetasters, while Lowell drew his examples from the more conspicuous writers in the United States, whether of prose or of verse. There was little mystery about the authorship of the “Fable.” Lowell did not put his name on the title-page, but he wrote himself all over the book; and though the publication was anonymous, he made no objection to the disclosure to Putnam, and apparently was careless about confining the knowledge to Briggs, Gay, and Page. Longfellow records in his diary under 15 June, 1848, “Passed an hour or two with Lowell, who read to me his satire on American authors; full of fun, and with very true portraits, as seen from that side.” It does not appear if Lowell read to his guest what he had recently written about him in the satire. And Dr. Holmes, to whom a copy of the book, as we have seen, was sent with the “author’s and so forths,” acknowledged it in a letter to Lowell, in which he characterizes it as “capital--crammed full and rammed down hard--powder (lots of it)--shot--slugs bullets--very little wadding, and that is gun-cotton--all crowded into a rusty looking blunderbuss barrel as it were,--capped with a percussion preface,--and cocked with a title-page as apropos as a wink to a joke.”[74]