The English more than any other nation have cultivated the dinner-table and the social meeting for the purpose of exchanging ideas regarding public affairs. Where an American public man will send for a reporter of a widely read newspaper if he has some important message to deliver to his constituents or the people at large, the Englishman will accept an invitation to a dinner of some society, and take that occasion for making a speech which will be reported and commented on in all the great dailies of the city and the provinces. Dinners, unveilings, cornerstones, meetings of societies,--these all become the accepted occasions for the propagation of ideas, and the most unrhetorical people in civilization blurt out their views at such times with a certain scorn of eloquence and admiration of candor. Moreover, the smallness of the great legislative chambers conduces to the conversational tone, and thus public speakers are trained to the disuse of oratory. It was natural that Lowell should be in demand on such occasions, and it was inevitable that he should make a remarkable impression. He had for years cultivated the art of speaking to small assemblies when he had a congenial subject and a responsive audience. He had the readiness of a practised writer, and he had above all a spontaneousness of nature which made him one of the best of conversationalists. It was but a slight remove from his lecture-room at Harvard, or his study at Elmwood, to an English dinner-table, and the themes on which he was called upon to speak were very familiar to him. Literature, the common elements of English and American life, the distinctiveness of America, these were subjects on which he was at home, and he brought to his task a manner quiet yet finished by years of practice. Had set orations been his business, he would scarcely have made so remarkable an impression as he made by his off-hand speeches. Yet it must not be supposed that these were careless, impromptu affairs. He was helped by his readiness, but he did not rely upon it. He thought out carefully his little address, and sometimes wrote it out in advance even when he made no use of manuscript. It was not unalloyed pleasure. “I am to speak at the Academy dinner to-morrow,” he writes to a friend, after he had had a couple of years practice in such functions, “which does not make me happy,--and not a fit word to say has yet occurred to me. They think I like to speak, I ‘do it so easily.’” He was not one to rise with the declaration that he had nothing to say, and then to say it. He respected his audience, and above all, with all his bonhomie, he never forgot that he was not a private guest, but the representative of a great nation. Not that he always harped on the one string of a community of nature and interest in the two countries, but he remembered that he was invited not simply as a man of letters but as the American minister.