When Lowell was in England in the summer of 1886 he had written to Mr. Gilder that his friend Miss Mary Boyle had some letters of Landor which she had intrusted to him for publication, and he proposed to preface them with an introduction of his own if Mr. Gilder would publish the paper in the _Century_. His letters show that he was moved not by any desire to write on Landor, but to help an old friend, and now that his Harvard address was off his hands, he applied himself to the task. He had the curiosity to look up his early paper on Landor in the _Massachusetts Quarterly_,[95] in which he remarks he found one good sentence and one other that he could not understand.[96] He sent the paper to Mr. Gilder, 23 December, 1886: “I send you a Christmas gift. I have made more of it than I expected, but you may eat only the plums if you like and give to the poor the pudding in which I have hidden them. The letters, thank Heaven, are better than I thought. The last (on Powers’s death) is charming. I have arranged them as well as I could without books. There is one on the Chinese War which I could date could I remember the year of that outrage--1841 or 2? You might find out. “Have I added too much of my own? And is it dull? _I_ am, but that’s nothing to the purpose. I could easily have held my peace, but I promised to play the Master of Ceremonies and must proclaim the rank of my guests. “I am sorry that some of the letters are copied on both sides. Most of them are in proper form. Send me proof here unless I say otherwise. If the hunting up of Christmas gifts hasn’t killed her, Give my love to Mrs. Gilder.”[97] The paper, which is included in “Latest Literary Essays and Addresses,” was a most agreeable compound of criticism and personal reminiscence, and contains what Lowell rarely ventured on in his printed work, but now and then in his letters with real success--the portraiture of a man. The article did not appear for a year; meanwhile he was in correspondence with Mr. Aldrich respecting some poems, and he had engaged to write the introduction to a subscription book, “The World’s Progress.” He had the assurance that the work thus introduced was a serious one, but his introduction had no special relation to it; it was an independent paper. “It rather attracts me,” he wrote, “through my sense of humor. It will be pure creation made out of nothing, not even nebula or star-dust,” and he added, what was indeed the secret of his undertaking the work, “the money it will fetch me will be a great medicine. Grandfathers get miserly. I never saved a penny till I had two [grandchildren].” As the new year opened, and he found himself in the midst of this set task: “I don’t get on with the world at all since I half promised to write an introduction to ‘The World’s Progress,’ a megatherium of a book in two volumes, quarto. I hear their heavy footfall behind me wherever I go, and am sure they will trample me into the mud at last.”