He was more in his own field when writing the article on “The American Tract Society,” since here his wit and satire were engaged on a theme where fundamental morals and expediency were at issue, and two articles which followed on Rufus Choate and Caleb Cushing[2] had the incisiveness of brilliant newspaper work, and a breadth not to be looked for in a newspaper. “Phillips [the publisher] was so persuaded,” he writes to Mr. Norton after the first had appeared, “of the stand given to the magazine by the Choate article that he has been at me ever since for another. So I have written a still longer one on Cushing. I think you will like it--though, on looking over the Choate article this morning, I am inclined to think that on the whole the better of the two. Better as a whole, I mean, for there are passages in this beyond any in that, I think. These personal things are not such as I should choose to do, for they subject me to all manner of vituperation; but one must take what immediate texts the newspapers afford him, and I accepted the responsibility in accepting my post.” It must be remembered that these articles were written two or three years before the great crisis was reached, and when in the minds of nearly all public men the question was one of everlasting debate, not yet of action, except so far as the debate found concrete expression in the struggle for possession in Kansas. In writing these personal papers Lowell therefore was using his scorn and satire in defence of the political idealists of whom he was one, and in attack of the political trimmers of whom he took Choate and Cushing as representatives. Yet even in these papers he recurs again and again to those fundamental political questions which underlie all notions of persons and parties. This is especially evident in the conclusion of the article on Caleb Cushing.