well performed by Mr. B. F. Butler. “Cambridge meanwhile is all agog with a wedding to come off this afternoon, Darley the artist and Miss Jenny (I think) Colburn. There is to be a wonderful turn-out of handsome bridesmaids, the bride having the good luck to be beautifully cousined. A great crush of hoops is looked for at Christ Church, and the coopers, it is said, will take the occasion for a strike. All the girls are crazy to go, and many who go in with a diameter of ten feet will come out with only two. I have sent for a new pair of lemon-colored gloves for the wedding visit. There will be a jam, of course, but then I am one of the harder sex, and shan’t mind it. They have my best wishes for a crop of little Darleyings. “So you are to have another war over there. I think it a shabby piece of business. Can you thrash a nation into friendly relations? And if a man don’t like your society, can you change his views by giving him a black eye? The Chinese are not a nation of savages, and with two hundred and forty millions of people they can hold out a great while in killed, wounded, and missing. I think John Bull and Johnny Crapaud will have their hands full before they are done with it. What has a Bull to do in a China-shop?” There was an incompatibility of temper in Lowell which stood in the way of entire pleasure in editing the _Atlantic_. He was not averse to work--instances enough have been shown of this--but he chafed under methodical work. He could work hours and even days with scarcely a respite, but he could also help himself to large measures of loafing. A magazine, with its incessant inflow of letters and manuscripts, and the demand which it makes for periodic punctuality, ill befits such a temper, and Lowell found a good deal of irksomeness in his daily task. “I used to be able to answer letters in the month during which I received them,” he wrote ruefully to Mr. White, 6 April, 1859, “but now they pile up and make a jam behind the boom of my occupations, till they carry everything before them, and after a little confused whirling float placidly down to the ocean of Oblivion. I do not know if it be so with everybody, but with me the perpetual _chance_ of interruption to which I am liable induces a kind of stolid despair. I am afraid that at this moment there are at least a hundred and fifty unanswered letters in and on and round my desk, whose blank [looks] seem to say ‘how long?’ Your letter came just in the midst of a bother in the _Atlantic_, which it took all my diplomacy to settle so that both sides should not bite their own noses off, to which mad meal they had violent appetites. It is all ‘fixed’ now, and things go smoothly again--but meanwhile the hiatus in my correspondence grew daily wider.”