The suspension of the _Pioneer_ left Lowell without any convenient vehicle for carrying further these appreciative papers, and he projected a book partly because the subject was in his mind, partly because he was anxious to turn his printed matter to fresh account, but chiefly, it must be inferred from the contents of the book, because he was eager to have freedom of speech on several matters which lay close to his mind. He resolved, therefore, to remodel his papers, so far as he used them at all, into a series of conversations. His work upon the book was hurried, as the letter last quoted from Miss White intimates. In September, 1844, he was planning a course of four or five lectures on English poetry, beginning with Chaucer, which he proposed delivering in Philadelphia in the winter immediately after his marriage; but he seems suddenly to have changed his mind, and to have tossed what he might have prepared into this new book, which opens with a long conversation on Chaucer,--a conversation split in the next edition into two. The passages from Chaucer which he quotes are drawn sometimes from the modernization by Wordsworth, but are also, in some cases, his own much closer simplification of the original. To the ear they depart very little from the original, the widest departure being in getting rid of the final _e_. The talk on Chaucer is followed by comments on Chapman and Ford, with reference by easy suggestion to Shakespeare, Marlowe, Fletcher, Pope, and Wordsworth. But though the staple of the “Conversations” is poetry, and there are generous examples and much keen appreciation of the poets discussed, the book would interest a reader to-day less by its treatment of the subjects which gave it excuse for being than by its free and careless exhibition of Lowell’s mind on topics of current concern. There is very little of dramatic assumption in the interlocutors. Philip and John are simply convenient personages playing at a battledore and shuttlecock game of words. Philip is the major character, who does all of the reading and advances most of the propositions, but John, whose chief part is to start Philip by questions, and to interpose occasional jibes or independent observations, is not differentiated in manner; he is another of Lowell’s many selves, and may be taken as the critical, interrupting side of his mind.[43] But both speakers are after the same game.