The _Atlantic_ itself gave him an agreeable change from his class-room duties, even if it took him along somewhat the same road as when, shortly after he undertook it, he received a contribution from Sainte-Beuve on Béranger, and translated it for the number for February, 1858. Two months later he began that series of criticisms on the successive volumes of Smith’s “Library of Old English Authors,” which he completed in the _North American_ ten years afterward, and combined into the long paper printed in the first volume of his “Literary Essays.” As an instance of minute detective work in criticism, the article is noteworthy, but we suspect that his readers to-day pass lightly over the scoring of Hazlitt’s editorship to read the brilliant characterizations of Elizabethan poets and dramatists, which crop out of the stony soil of textual criticism. In writing these articles Lowell was recurring to subjects which had, as we have seen, unfailing interest for him, and one cannot compare these notes on Chapman, Webster, Marlowe, and others with the observations that occur in “Conversations with the Old Dramatists,” without marking the greater mellowness of nature from which the later criticism proceeds. Lowell writes of them, not as in the first instance when he was just returned from a voyage of discovery, but as one who has lived long and familiarly in this rich country of the poetic mind.[19] Excepting the “Biglow Papers,” a couple of political articles, two or three poems, and a few brief reviews of books, Lowell did not contribute to the _Atlantic_ during the four years of the war, and naturally he turned his prose work into the _North American_ after he became one of its editors. There, as we have seen, his work was mainly political, though he also did much reviewing of books; but after the pressure of war-time was lifted he made the review the vehicle for more strictly literary articles, and it was plainly a relief to him to spring back to subjects more congenial to his nature. In January, 1865, when Mr. Norton supplied the main political paper, Lowell printed that most characteristic article which in his collected writings bears the title “New England Two Centuries Ago,” and is in outward form a review of the third volume of Palfrey’s “History of New England” and of four volumes of the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. In its larger part a skilful florilegium of early writings, the paper is also and emphatically the reflection of Lowell’s mind during the stress of the war, when he was doubly concerned over the relation between the two great English-speaking nations and the practical solutions of the problems presented to democracy in the reëstablishment of order and union in the United States. He had rising in him, as his Ode shows, a great passion for the whole country; but as has been well said by Colonel Higginson, that no one can be a true cosmopolitan who is not at