“But one man with a pen is a terrible thing, With a head and heart behind it, And this one man’s words had an ominous ring, That somehow in people’s ears would cling;-- ‘But the mob’s uncorrupted: they’ve eggs to fling; So t is hardly worth while to mind it; As for freedom,’ says Otis, ‘I’ve given her notice To leave town, in writing, and underlined it.’ “But the one man’s helper grew into a sect, That laughed at all efforts to check or scare it, Old parties before it were scattered and wrecked, And respectable folks knew not what to expect;-- ‘’Tis some consolation, at least to reflect And will help us, I think, to bear it, That all this,’ says Otis, ‘Though by no means _in votis_, Began with one man and a boy in a garret.’” Lowell himself, in the Introduction which he wrote to the Second Series, bears witness to the popularity of the “Biglow Papers” while they were still uncollected. “Very far,” he says, “from being a popular author under my own name, so far indeed as to be almost unread, I found the verses of my pseudonym copied everywhere: I saw them pinned up in workshops: I heard them quoted and their authorship debated.” It was, it may be said, no new thing to seek to arrest the public attention with the vernacular applied to public affairs. Major Jack Downing and Sam Slick had been notable exemplars, and they had many imitators; but party politics, or even local characteristics, may give rise to the merely idle jest of satire; the reader who laughed over the racy narrative of the unlettered Ezekiel, and then took up Hosea’s poem and caught the gust of Yankee wrath and humor blown fresh in his face, knew that he was in with the appearance of something new in American literature. After the first heat, Lowell began to distrust his mode a little. “As for Hosea,” he writes to Briggs, “I am sorry that I began by making him such a detestable speller. There is no fun in bad spelling of itself, but only where the misspelling suggests something else which is droll _per se_. You see I am getting him out of it gradually. I mean to altogether. Parson Wilbur is about to propose a subscription for fitting him for college, and has already commenced his education.”[78] He dropped this intention, however, and the later numbers of the series show no marked departure from the general scheme of Yankee spelling. There is no doubt, though, that when it came to a revision of the papers for final book publication, Lowell did make an attempt to introduce some sort of consistency or effectiveness in the form. He groaned over the labor involved, and confessed that he made a great many alterations in spelling even after the pages had been stereotyped. “It is the hardest book to print,” he wrote Mr. Gay, “that ever I had anything to do with, and, what with corrections and Mr. Wilbur’s annotations, keeps me more employed than I care to be.”