Clever as are the portraits,--some of the lines are bitten in with a little acid,--and though there are but few of the authors characterized who have not even a more secure place to-day than then, the “Fable” can scarcely be said ever to have had or retained much vogue as a whole. In the excitement of writing his crackling lines Lowell believed himself to be making a hit, but hardly had the ink dried than he saw it for what it was, intellectual effervescence that made one hilarious for the moment. “It seems bald and poor enough now, the Lord knows,” he wrote between the first and second editions. Forty years afterward, however, on recalling it, he said it was the first popular thing he had written. He never was quite easy as to his treatment of Bryant: “I am quite sensible now,” he wrote in 1855, “that I did not do Mr. Bryant justice in the ‘Fable.’ But there was no personal feeling in what I said, though I have regretted what I _did_ say because it might seem personal.” And as late as 1887 he characterized his poem written for Bryant’s birthday as a kind of palinode to what he had said of him in the “Fable,” “which has something of youth’s infallibility in it, or at any rate of youth’s irresponsibility.” Aside from this slight uneasiness, Lowell does not appear to have repented of any of his judgments, nor did he ever revise the poem for subsequent editions. No doubt, the disregard of the poem has been due largely to the ephemeral nature of much of the jocoseness. The puns, good and bad, with which it is sprinkled, are so many notices of “good for this time only,” and the petty personalities and trivial bits of satire lower the average of the whole. The “Fable” must be taken for just what it was to the author and his friends, a piece of high spirits with which to make sport: the salt that savors it is to be found in the few masterly characterizations and criticisms.