When Lowell went to England he apprehended difficulty in maintaining the position of an American minister on his salary, which could not greatly be increased from his modest fortune. Indeed, he said frankly that it would have been quite impossible to play the host as it should be played, except for the unhappy fortune which compelled Mrs. Lowell to withdraw from society. His friends told him, with that candor which makes English society at once so refreshing and so amusing, that since Mrs. Lowell could not entertain, he was quite at liberty to accept all manner of invitations, and be under no obligation to return them. So his public duties called him in many directions socially, and he was able, besides doing a little business by the way in these diversions, to see the best of the intellectual life of the day. He had a choice group of friends who had known him before he was a public man, and his position gave shim the entrée in all society, but he whispered: “I think on the whole I find no society so good as what I have been accustomed to at home.” All this brought him, moreover, an endless correspondence which quite effectually interfered with the friendly letters which had been so natural an outlet of his moods. “Did you ever happen,” he writes to Mr. Field, 20 August, 1880, “to be watching the top of a post when a snowstorm was beginning? You would have seen first a solitary flake come wavering down and make a lodgment, then another and another, till finally a white nightcap covered the whole knob. My head is very like that wooden protuberance, and that’s the way letters descend upon it. While I am answering one a dozen more have fallen, and if I let a day go by, I am overwhelmed. And days go by without my knowing it. You tell Mabel that five have passed since you wrote--which is simply absurd. I think it was about fifteen minutes ago that I got it.”