Upon his return from Chicago Lowell gave six lectures on the Old Dramatists before the Lowell Institute. Though in accepting the invitation he was returning to an early love he had never forsaken, the preparation was a burden. “I haven’t time for a word more,” he wrote to Mr. Gilder, 3 March, 1887, “for I begin a course of lectures next Tuesday and haven’t yet begun to write them, though I have done a deil o’ thinking,” and to Mr. Higginson on 8 March: “I am fagged to death. I never ought to have consented to the Lowell Lectures. If I get over them without breaking down, I shall be happy. After they are (if _I_ am not) over, I will try to do what you ask. But my brains are husks just now.” Perhaps there was no better barometer of Lowell’s spirits than his temper regarding out of door life. Time was when the frosty winter air was elixir to him, but now he writes: “It is growing colder as my legs inform me--for I have had no fire to-day. I look out of window and see that the sun is gone behind a cloud, and the white lines of snow along the walls marking out the landscape as if for a tennis-court of Anakim. I don’t like winter so well as I used. It tempts the rheumatism out of all its ambushes, as the sun thaws out snakes. And the walking is like bad verses.” The confession gains force when one considers that all his life Lowell had been indifferent to the need of a top coat, and preferred to work in his study at a temperature of 60°. In his first lecture Lowell said that he should have preferred to entitle his course “Readings from the Old English Dramatists with illustrative comments,” and that is practically what he made of his work. The slim volume in which, after his death, the six lectures were contained, does not at all stand for six hours’ entertainment of his audience; long passages which he read from printed books do not appear at all, as there were no passages in his written lectures which introduced or followed them. Lowell was recurring to a familiar theme, and his intention plainly was to speak freely out of a full mind. He does not appear to have re-read his early “Conversations;” he had not seen it, he said, for many years, and he was not quite sure just what its subjects were. A comparison of the two treatments separated by forty-four years shows curious likenesses and differences. As will be remembered, the young critic was so zealous over his ideas of reform that Chapman and Ford, the only dramatists he treated, and Chaucer, were often no more than mere prompters in the discussion of some current phase of morals or society. A little of this disposition to vagrancy reappears in these later talks, for they are quite as informal in their way as were the earlier Conversations. But in place of the topics connected with reform, there are more cognate themes. Since he is to speak of Marlowe, he finds it easy to make, by way of preface, an enquiry into the refinement which had been going on in the language, and