It may have struck the reader how little comment, comparatively, Lowell made during his life upon his fellows in American literature. We must except of course his poetic criticism in “A Fable for Critics” and “Agassiz;” but in his prose criticism he occupied himself most constantly with the dead, not the living. When, later, he spoke on “Our Literature” at the Washington Centennial in New York he confined himself to generalities. It is worth noting, therefore, that on an occasion when he was called on to preside at an Authors’ Reading for the benefit of the Copyright League[101] he prefaced his argument for an international copyright act with a résumé of the course of American literature, and some more specific characterization of the contemporaries with whom his own name always will be associated. As a somewhat unwonted personal sketch, even though scarcely more than an off-hand deliverance, it may well be given here as one of the last of Lowell’s public addresses. “When I was beginning life, as it is called,--as if we were not always beginning it!--the question ‘Who reads an American book?’ still roused in the not too numerous cultivated class among us a feeling of resentful but helpless anger. The pens of our periodical writers fairly sputtered with rage, and many a hardly suppressed imprecation might be read between their lines. Their position was, in truth, somewhat difficult. We had had Jonathan Edwards, no doubt; and people were still living who thought Barlow’s ‘Hasty Pudding’ a lightsome _jeu d’esprit_, and who believed that Dwight’s ‘Conquest of Canaan’ was a long stride towards that of posterity and the conversion of the heathen there. We had had Freneau, who wrote a single line,-- ‘The hunter and the deer a shade,’