The fun we make often discloses the gravity that lies behind, as if we could exorcise a spirit by jesting at it, and Lowell was tormented, strange to say, by the apprehension of old age long before he approached it. There is, therefore, something pathetic as well as humorous in the fragment of Mr. Wilbur’s letter which introduces the “Latest Views of Mr. Biglow.” It is the imitation palsy again, and yet behind Mr. Wilbur’s tremulous phrases one reads those strong convictions which Lowell held to throughout the perplexing days before Gettysburg. “Though I believe Slavery,” Mr. Wilbur says, “to have been the cause of it [the war] by so thoroughly demoralizing Northern politicks for its own purposes as to give opportunity and hope to treason, yet I would not have our thought and purpose diverted from their true object,--the maintenance of the idea of Government. We are not merely suppressing an enormous riot, but contending for the possibility of permanent order coexisting with democratical fickleness; and while I would not superstitiously venerate form to the sacrifice of substance, neither would I forget that an adherence to precedent and prescription can alone give that continuity and coherence under a democratic constitution which are inherent in the person of a despotick monarch and the selfishness of an aristocratical class. _Stet pro ratione voluntas_ is as dangerous in a majority as in a tyrant.” Distinct as are the judgments of Mr. Wilbur, it is after all in the poems from Hosea Biglow and his foil Birdofredom Sawin that we get the freest and most luminous expression of Lowell’s mind. He began the new series in a low key by recounting the experience of the renegade Yankee during the years since the Mexican war, but the affair of the Trent happened immediately after he had written the first paper, and before completing Birdofredom’s story he dashed off that quaint fable of the dialogue between the Bridge and the Monument, ending with the verses “Jonathan to John,” which was a genuine delivery of his mind. “If I am not mistaken,” he wrote to Mr. Fields on sending it, “it will _take_. ’Tis about Mason and Slidell, and I have ended it with a refrain that I hope has a kind of _tang_ to it.” The judgments which he passed in it were not momentary impulses. Three years later he wrote a letter[9] which repeats in prose much the same sentiments. It would be difficult to find a better exponent than Lowell of the temper of educated Americans toward England, a temper which discriminates sharply between the England of history and of personal affection and the England that registered in the nineteenth century the prejudices of a lingering bureaucratic régime.