Not long after Lowell’s return from Baltimore rumors began to fly about that he was to have a foreign mission. Mr. Longfellow notes in his diary, 7 April, 1877: “In the afternoon Charles Norton called. We talked of Ruskin and Carlyle, and of Lowell’s having the English mission.” It was not unnatural that public attention should be called to him in connection with some diplomatic post, in view of the somewhat peculiar circumstances connected with his relations to the recent presidential election. He was one of the electors in Massachusetts upon the Republican ballot, and when the issue of the election was in doubt and many believed that Mr. Tilden was the actual choice though Mr. Hayes was nominally chosen, there were voices that called on Lowell to use his technical right and cast his vote for Mr. Tilden. It was a curious comment on affairs. It implied on the part of those who proposed it a confidence that Lowell was independent enough to use this right. I am not sure that any other elector was named who might be expected to take this responsibility. On the other hand, those who urged this course seem to have been blind to the enormous violation of faith involved in such a course. The machinery of the electoral system, however it had been designed at first, had gradually and immutably become a mere device for the registry of the popular choice; all initiative on the part of the electors was totally cancelled. Lowell himself never had any hesitation. As he wrote to Mr. Leslie Stephen: “In my own judgment I have no choice, and am bound in honor to vote for Hayes, as the people who chose me expected me to do. They did not choose me because they had confidence in my judgment, but because they thought they knew what that judgment would be. If I had told them that I should vote for Tilden, they would never have nominated me. It is a plain question of trust. The provoking part of it is that I tried to escape nomination all I could, and only did not decline because I thought it would be making too much fuss over a trifle.”