Slave Law.” Whittier complained to Lowell over some delay in connection with a poem sent to the _Atlantic_: “Let me hear from thee some way. If thee fail to do this, I shall turn thee out of thy professor’s chair, by virtue of my new office of overseer.” To commentators who tamper with Shakespeare’s text, Lowell felt “inclined to apply the quadrisyllablic name of the brother of Agis, King of Sparta”; Felton identified the brother of Agis as Eudamidas. A characteristic conversation between Holmes and Hawthorne goes thus: “Holmes said quickly ‘I wish you would come to the Club oftener.’ ‘I should like to,’ said Hawthorne, ‘but I can’t drink.’ ‘Neither can I.’ ‘Well, but I can’t eat.’ ‘Nevertheless, we should like to see you.’ ‘But I can’t talk, either.’” Actually, Hawthorne hardly ever spoke at the Club, preferring to sit next to Emerson or Longfellow and to let the other speak for him. Once, however, he spoke to amusing effect. Anthony Trollope, a guest, had roared out that only England produced good peaches or grapes. Lowell reports: “I appealed to Hawthorne, who sat opposite. His face mantled and trembled for a moment with some droll fancy, as one sees bubbles rise and send off rings in still water when a turtle stirs at the bottom, and then he said: ‘I asked an Englishman once who was praising their peaches to describe to me what he meant by a peach, and he described something very like a cucumber.’” A brilliant letter from the elder Henry James still further visualizes Hawthorne at the Club: “He has the look all the time, to one who doesn’t know him, of a rogue who suddenly finds himself in a company of detectives. But in spite of his rusticity, I felt a sympathy for him amounting to anguish.... It was so pathetic to see him, contented, sprawling Concord owl that he was and always has been, brought blindfold into the brilliant daylight, and expected to wink and be lively like any little dapper Tommy Titmouse or Jenny Wren. How he buried his eyes in his plate, and ate with a voracity that no person should dare to ask him a question ... eating his dinner and doing absolutely nothing but that, and then going home to his Concord den to fall on his knees and ask his Heavenly Father why it was that an owl couldn’t remain an owl, and not be forced into the diversions of a canary.”