Lowell’s friendliness showed itself in the informal visits he liked to make to his friends when he was in town, and the familiar letters he wrote from the country. He was rather more ready to entertain a correspondent with a bit of criticism than to heed the calls made on him by editors for the same kind of writing done with formal purpose. Thus he writes to Mrs. Bell from Deerfoot Farm, Thanksgiving Day, 1887: “A second-rate author two hundred years old has a great advantage over his juniors of our own day. If he himself have not the merit of originality, his language has that of quaintness which sometimes gives him a charm similar in its effect though very inferior in quality. I think this is true of Feltham, though it be now more than twenty years since I have looked into him. I had read him in the day of my superstition when one takes all established reputations for granted, and read him over again after Experience had let fall her fatal clarifying drops into my eyes. Woe’s me, how he has dwarfed! I wrote my opinion of him on the flyleaf of my little quarto edition, and all I can recollect of him is that I called his style ‘lousy with Latinisms.’ Pardon me. Swift was still read when I was young, and how resist the alliteration? I can pardon Browne’s Latinisms, nay, his Græcisms too, and even like them. They are resolved in the powerful menstruum of his thought. They are farsought and yet seem not farfetched. Feltham’s are stuck-in like plums in his poor pudding and make the dough more dismal by contrast. He hasn’t _stoned_ them and we crush between our teeth something hard and out of place that leaves an acrid taste behind it. I remember one phrase of his that tickled me--the ‘spacious ears’ of the elephant. It fits another animal, and sometimes when I have been assfixiated by an audience I have been tempted to beg of them to ‘lend me their spacious ears.’ “I think it possible that I gave Longfellow the references to him, for I was reading him about the time the Dante translation was going on. I could tell if I had my copy here and could take a look at the flyleaves. “I may do Feltham wrong. The _navicella di nostro ingenio_ draws more water as we grow older, and grounds in the shallows where we found good water-fowling in our youth. “No doubt the book is in the Athenæum,--but wait, please, till I can lend you my copy. It is at Elmwood, and I can get it after I come back from New York, whither I go to be baited for the benefit of the International Copyright League. I wish there were a concise and elegant Latinism for D--n! I would bring it in gracefully here. “I didn’t mean to write all this and shouldn’t if I hadn’t had something else I ought to be doing. How tempting the duty that lies farthest from us always is, to be sure!”