over white chokers, and a general upward tendency of all the features as who should say, ‘Regard me attentively but awfully; I am on intimate terms with Lord Fitzpollywog.’ On Saturday evenings we are ‘at home.’ We have tea, cake, and friends.... The evening before last I went to a musical party at Mrs. Rich’s. You know what an English musical party is. Your average Englishman enjoys nothing beyond ‘God save the Queen,’ and that because he can either beat time or swell the chorus with his own private contribution of discord. But I saw here the dogged resolution of the people who have conquered America and India. There was no shrinking under long variations on the pianoforte, and I could well imagine a roast beef and plum-pudding basis under the solid indifference which outlasted a half-hour’s fiddling. Miss Fanny Erskine, a niece of our hostess, sang well, especially in German, and Emiliani is really a fine artist with the violin.” In an earlier letter to Dr. Howe, Lowell had said: I begin to think myself too old to travel. As to men,--as I used to say at home,--the average of human nature to the square foot is very much the same everywhere; and as to buildings and such like monuments, I bring to them neither the mind nor the eye of twenty. In almost all such I find myself more interested, as they are exponents and illustrations of the spiritual and political life and progress of the people who built them. The relations of races to the physical world do not excite me to study and observation (only to be fruitfully pursued on the spot) in any proportion to the interest I feel in those relations to the moral advance of mankind, which one may as easily trace at home, in their history and literature, as here. But of Rome hereafter. I feel as if I should continue a stranger and foreigner during my whole six months’ residence here.” A month or so later he revised a little of this judgment in a letter to his father, in which he wrote: “You need not be afraid of our getting attached to Europe. I find the modes of life here more agreeable to me in some respects, but nothing can replace Elmwood. In regard to our coming home, the exact time will depend entirely on the accounts we get of your health. I do not wish to have the money we have spent thrown away, for I see no chance of our ever coming hither again, and so I wish to do everything as thoroughly as I can. I have profited already, I think, in the study of art. I make it a rule now on entering a gallery to endeavor to make out the painters of such pictures as I like by the internal characteristics of the works themselves. After I have made up my mind, I look at my catalogue. I find this an exceedingly good practice. Of all the more prominent painters, I can now distinguish the style and motive almost at a glance. Sometimes I make a particular study of a particular artist, if any gallery is especially rich in his works. Life is rather more picturesque here than with us, and I find