It was in the double office of American minister and poet that he took part in the ceremonies attending the unveiling of the bust of Longfellow in Westminster Abbey, 2 March, 1884. But the personal relation which he bore the poet was uppermost in his mind, especially as he was renewing his intercourse with the family in the person of two of Longfellow’s daughters who were living in England at this time and were present at the unveiling. The occasion was not one for critical judgment, but in the course of his brief speech he made a felicitous point on sonnet writing. “I have been struck particularly,” he said, “with this quality of style in some of my late friend’s sonnets, which seem to me in unity and evenness of flow among the most beautiful and perfect we have in the language. They remind one of those cabinets in which all the drawers are opened at once by the turn of the key in a single lock, whereas we all have seen sonnets with a lock in every line with a different key to each, and the added conundrums of secret drawers.” In April came the tercentenary commemoration of the University of Edinburgh, when Lowell was present and received the degree of Doctor of Laws. The same degree was conferred on him at his own University a few weeks later. In May he was called on for two addresses. On the seventh of the month he attended the annual dinner of the Provincial Newspaper Society at the Inns of Court Hotel, London, and a few words which he then said, because spoken apparently without premeditation, are worth recording as expressing a judgment held by him with great sincerity. “I have my own theory,” he said, “as to what after-dinner speaking should be. I think it should be in the first place short; I think it should be light; and I think it should be both extemporaneous and contemporaneous. I think it should have the meaning of the moment in it, and nothing more. But I confess that when I get up here and face you, representing what you call the Provincial Press--and if you will allow me by way of an interjection, I may state that it has been my fortune to live in a number of countries, where it has sometimes been my duty to study the National Press, and I have always and everywhere found it provincial: I have never yet encountered a truly cosmopolitan newspaper--when I feel myself standing for the first time in the presence of a collection of editors, I experience a very serious emotion. I feel as if I were talking to the ear of Dionysius, at the other end of which the world was listening. I do not see any reporters here--I am glad I do not. I cannot help taking this opportunity, with so many persons who have the formation of public opinion before me, of saying one or two words on the growing change which has taken place in the methods of forming public opinion. I am not sure that you are always aware to how great an extent you have supplanted the pulpit, to how great an extent you have supplanted even the deliberative assembly.