The editor of _The Broadway Journal_ began fencing with the author. He wondered to whom it was addressed. He thought perhaps it would be best not to print the whole. “Your satire,” he wrote, “bruises instead of cutting the flesh, and makes a confounded sore place without letting out any of the patient’s bad blood. I will make as full a selection as I can; but there are certain expressions that could not be safely used in public.” He regrets that his friend should have lost so much time over the letter, but thinks it must have done him good by drawing off his superfluous zeal. “I shall think better of you myself for knowing that you can feel so strongly and write so harshly,” he adds: “it justifies the opinion that I expressed of you in my notice of your ‘Conversations;’” and after a further discussion of abolitionism in principle and practice, he begs him to write something about Philadelphia, or art, the academy, the abominable white doors, the poor watery oysters, everything and anything. “Put all your abolitionism into rhyme,” he concludes: “everybody will read it in that shape, and it will do good. Don’t forget that you are a poet and go to writing newspaper articles.” The letter was shrewd, kind, reasonable to an uninterested reader, but must have been exacerbating to Lowell. Mr. Briggs could not conceal the final ground of his refusal, that to publish this and similar letters would be to jeopard the fortunes of _The Broadway Journal_, and in the sensitive condition of the mind of the out and out abolitionist, this was arrant cowardice. A good deal of correspondence followed, and Lowell lost his interest in the _Journal_, though he retained his strong affection for his friend and sent him, as well as a few poems, a slashing criticism of the exhibition in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and a review of Halleck’s “Alnwick Castle, with other Poems,” but _The Broadway Journal_ itself died out of existence shortly, Mr. Briggs parting company with it at the end of a half year.[48] In sending the former of the two prose articles mentioned above, Lowell wrote:-- PHILADELPHIA, Feb’y 15. MY DEAR FRIEND,--I send you something which will help you fill up, and will show my _willingness_ to help till I can send something better. I am so continually interrupted here, and have been so long used to having all my time to myself, that I have not been able yet to acquire the habit of using anything but the very titbits of my time. I have begun several articles for you, but failed in satisfying myself, but before long hope to send you something to your taste. I will send a poem at any rate. Halleck, I see, is about to publish a new edition, which I should like to write a notice of if you have made no other arrangement. This notice of the “Academy” I have written, you see, as editorial, and you can modify it as you please.