The success of the book was immediate. The first edition of 1500 was gone in a week, and the author could say with satisfaction that “the book was actually out of print before a second edition could be struck off from the plates.” In later years the book was apt to fill him with a kind of amused astonishment. The unstinted praise which Hughes gave to the “Biglow Papers,” quotations from which were always on his tongue’s end, drew from Lowell the expression: “I was astonished to find what a heap of wisdom was accumulated in those admirable volumes.” It is not strange that, in looking back from the tranquil temper of older years, Lowell should be struck with the high spirits, the tension of feeling, and the abandon of utterance which characterize this work; but when he was in the thick of the fight a second time he was more impressed by the moral earnestness which underlay all this free lancing. “The success of my experiment,” he wrote, in the Introduction to the Second Series, “soon began not only to astonish me, but to make me feel the responsibility of knowing that I held in my hand a weapon instead of the mere fencing stick I had supposed.... If I put on the cap and bells, and made myself one of the court fools of King Demos, it was less to make his Majesty laugh than to win a passage to his royal ears for certain serious things which I had deeply at heart.” The force which Lowell displayed in this satire made his book at once a powerful ally of a sentiment which heretofore had been crassly ridiculed; it turned the tables and put Anti-slavery, which had been fighting sturdily on foot with pikes, into the saddle, and gave it a flashing sabre. For Lowell himself it won an accolade from King Demos. He rose up a knight, and thenceforth possessed a freedom which was a freedom of nature, not a simple badge of service in a single cause. His patriotism and moral fervor found other vents in later life, and he never sheathed the sword which he had drawn from the scabbard; but it is significant of the stability of his genius that he was not misled into a limitation of his powers by the sudden distinction which came to him. For, though we naturally think first of the political significance of the “Biglow Papers,” the book, in its fullest meaning, is an expression of Lowell’s personality, and has in it the essence of New England. The character of the race from which its author sprang is preserved in its vernacular and in the characters of the _dramatis personæ_. Not unwittingly, but in the full consciousness of his own inheritance, Lowell became the spokesman of a racy people, whose moral force had a certain acrid quality, and, when thrown to the winds, as in the person of Birdofredom Sawin, was replaced by an insolent shrewdness. Nor is the exemplification of New England less complete for that infusion of homely sentiment and genuine poetic sensibility which underlie and penetrate the sturdy moral force.