SET FORTH IN _October, the 31st day, in the year ’48_ G. P. PUTNAM, BROADWAY. [73] Hunt’s poem again doubtless owed its being to Lord Byron’s _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_. [74] Morse’s _Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes_, ii. 107. In an unfinished letter to Dr. Holmes written from Madrid in 1878, Lowell refers to a recent criticism of Holmes’s poems, in which the characterization in the _Fable_ was quoted. “I thought the young fellow who wrote it had some sense, especially as he quoted something I said of you in my impudence thirty years ago. It is an awful thought, but these who then were passing out of the baldness of infancy are now entering upon that of middle age, and here we both are as if nothing had happened. And probably precious little has happened,--I mean of any great account. The more one reads of history the more one sees mankind doing the same foolish things over again with admirable gravity and then contemplating themselves with the satisfaction of Jack Horner. I remember when I was writing the _Fable for Critics_ and used to walk up and down the front walk at Elmwood, I paused to watch the ant-hills, and in the seemingly aimless and yet ceaseless activity of their citizens thought I saw a very close paraphrase of the life of men.” [75] The Bibliographical Note in the Appendix gives the dates of the successive numbers. See Appendix C. [76] When he was supervising the final _Riverside_ edition of his writings, he gladly accepted the services of a graduate student at Harvard, now Professor of Law in Western Reserve University, Mr. Frank Beverly Williams, who prepared a series of notes. [77] Mr. Otis died October 28. “Only think of H. G. O!” wrote Lowell to Gay early in November; “I would not have squibbed him if I had known he was sick, but I never hear anything.” [78] Writing forty years later in excuse of a petty solecism, he said: “I think it must have been written when I was fresh from the last _Biglow Papers_. When my soul enters Mr. Biglow’s person, she divests herself for the time of all conventional speech, and for some time after she leaves it is apt to forget herself.” [79] He had the ill luck which not infrequently attends the writers of fiction, to make use of an actual name in one of his inventions, and received this protest from the Rev. H. Wilbur:-- “Unknown Sir, I believe there is no other clergyman in New England besides myself of the same name you sometimes associate with your writings. Perhaps with the scintillations of your genius my name would be more likely to descend to posterity than from writings or labours of my own. But if your edification could be as well promoted under the ministry of Parson Smith or some _fictitious_ name not likely to be associated with individuality as with the _old Parson_ you will much oblige yours very respectfully.” [80] He intended first to call this “A June Idyll.” [81] That is, the hostile criticisms of his book.