Lowell certainly had nothing of that superficial habit of reviewing which is at the bottom of most of the unsatisfactory work of this kind. In reviewing White’s Shakespeare, for example, he read over twice every word of the commentary and notes and then laid the book aside that his impression might settle and clarify before he wrote his criticism. Swift as he was in writing, there was, for the most part, a long period of brooding over his creative work and in study over his criticism. He wrote an article, for instance, on “Wedgwood’s Dictionary,” and complained regarding it to Mr. Norton: “You know my unfortunate weakness for doing things not quite superficially. So I have been a week about it--press waiting--devil at my elbow (I mean the printer’s)--every dictionary and vocabulary I own gradually gathering in a semicircle round my chair,--and three of the days of twelve solid hours each. And with what result? at most six pages, which not six men will care anything about. And now it is done I feel as if I had taken hold of the book the wrong way, and that I should have devoted myself to his theory more and to particulars less; or, rather, that I ought to have had more space. But I had a gap to fill up,--just so much and no more. There is one passage[124] in it that I wager will make all of you laugh, and heavens! what fun I could have made of the book if I had been unscrupulous! But I soon learned to respect Wedgwood’s attainments, and resisted all temptation.” Just as Lowell’s fun could find its way even into an index, so in his sober criticisms he would sometimes hide a jest for the delectation of especially discerning readers, as when in his article on White’s Shakespeare, he remarks incidentally: “To every commentator who has wantonly tampered with the text, or obscured it with his inky cloud of paraphrase, we feel inclined to apply the quadrisyllabic name of the brother of Agis, king of Sparta.” Felton, Longfellow tells us in a letter to Sumner, was the first to unearth the joke and to remember or discover that this name was Eudamidas.