The article in the Contributors’ Club was a humorous defence of certain American locutions and forms of spelling against half-learned objections. It was a return to a favorite theme and contains an amusing sketch of a proof-reader whom we take to be his old friend Mr. George Nichols. The club is in a vein which naturally assumes a half antique manner, and the treatment shows that smiling acceptance of the prejudices of learning which is the scholar’s defence against the logic of the pedant. Even this trifle, unsigned, and inconspicuous in its setting, could not get printed finally without two or three hurried notes from its author, amending and adding to it, and the last proofs were returned with a sigh: “I thought the thing livelier than I find it--it kicked so lustily in the womb. But nothing is good after ’tis born!” If Lowell was growing old, so also were others with whom he had had lifelong associations. Whittier was twelve years his senior, and though all his life an invalid, never lost his singing voice, and Lowell wrote him, 16 December, 1890:-- DEAR FRIEND WHITTIER,--I had meant to write you a word of thanks for your “Captain’s Well” [in the _New York Ledger_], but that with some other good intentions was hindered of fruition by my illness. It seemed to me in your happiest vein--a vein peculiarly your own. Tears came into my eyes as I read it. Since I could not write then, I do it now to wish you and all of us many happy returns of your birthday. It is partly a selfish wish, for the world will seem a worse world to me when you have left it, but it is not wholly so. The universal love and honor which attend you, and in which I heartily join, are of excellent example, and it is well that you should live long to enjoy them. Faithfully yours, J. R. LOWELL. Dedications, those shy birds, came fluttering about Lowell in these days. One was in an anonymous volume of verse from a friend dear for her own sake and her mother’s. It had come to him in manuscript first and then revised. When it came first, he wrote: “I am perfectly satisfied with the dedication--how should I not be? But how, in any case, could I look such a gift horse in the mouth? I should like it _quand même_ as a proof of your affection, for that is the main thing; ‘Only, only call me dear!’” and two days later, when an alternate form came: “Yes, I like this better. I could not have discussed what you should say in such a case, but you have shown your woman’s wit (as I thought you would) in divining what I stole from Coleridge and he from Lessing.”