There was one form of public appearance which Lowell reluctantly allowed himself to take up in this winter of 1886. The rage for Authors’ Readings had set in, and under the guise of charity of one sort or another, society compelled its favorites to stand and deliver their old poems. “I am having proof sheets,” he wrote to Mr. Field, 30 March, 1886, “and I have been reading in public with O. W. H. and oh, don’t I wish I had never written a verse! Take warning by me, old boy, and if you make a rhyme by accident, duck yourself in holy water to wash the Devil clean out of you,--or they’ll have you on a platform before you can say Jack Robinson, or even d--n.” A keener thrust came to him now and then when he was urged to read poems which others could read, it might be, with equanimity, but which were for him like raising the lid of a coffin. The proof sheets to which he refers in this letter were of the small volume “Democracy and other Addresses,” a volume which appeared in the spring of 1886, just before Lowell went back to England for the summer. Here he gave himself up to those pleasures which he could enjoy but sparingly when he was in the official harness. His friends welcomed him most cordially, and he made a round of visits. He looked on upon the game of English politics with the eye of a trained observer, but resisted all enticements to write or speak for the English public, though he did preside at one dinner. “I made an epigram (extempore) one day on the G. O. M.,” he writes to his daughter, “and repeated it to Lord Acton. His greatness not so much in genius lies As in adroitness, when occasions rise, Lifelong convictions to extemporize. This morning I find the last lines quoted by Auberon Herbert in a letter to the _Times_, but luckily without my name. It is a warning.” “I am living a futile life here,” he writes to Mr. Norton, “but am as fond of London as Charles Lamb. The rattle of a hansom shakes new life into my old bones, and I ruin myself in them. I love such evanescent and unimportunate glimpses of the world as I catch from my flying perch. I envy the birds no longer, and learn better to converse with them. Our views of life are the same.” It was the summer also when Dr. Holmes made his royal progress through England, and Lowell had the pleasure of seeing the hearty welcome his old friend received. To Mr. Field he wrote, 27 July, 1886:-- “I met Mrs. Archibald Forbes the other day and had much talk with her about you. She did not give me much comfort,--except in telling me that you had gone away from Washington for the summer. This means, I suppose, that you are well enough to go to Ashfield, which I take as a good sign. I constantly meet old friends of yours here who ask after you affectionately. I give them what comfort I can by telling them how bravely both of you bear up under your common sorrow....