wrote when Greece had her Parthenon and had boasted her Pericles.  France had given birth to Richelieu when Moliere assumed the sack, and England had sustained the Reformation and conquered the land of the Cid when Butler, with his satires, shaking church and state, appeared before her king.  So with America.  It was not until wrongs were to be redressed, and unworthy ambitions to be checked, that the voice of LOWELL’S scornful laughter was heard in the land, piercing, with its keen cadences and mirth-provoking rhyme, the policy of government and the ghostly armor of many a spectral faith and ism.

True, we had the famous ‘Hasty Pudding’ of Joel Barlow, the ’Terrible Tractoration’ of Fessenden, and Halleck’s ‘Fanny,’ but these were mere jeux, gallant little histories, over which we laughed and voila le tout! And our Astolfo, Holmes, flying by on his winged horse, sends down now and then

  ’His arrowes an elle long
  With pecocke well ydight,’

which we gather, and our fair dames weave into brilliant fans that flutter and snap in many a gay assembly, and whose myriad eyes of blue and purple smile with irresistible mirthfulness into the most hostile countenances.  Still Holmes apparently likes best the unrestrained freedom of prose.  His genius delights in periods finished after its own heart,—­pyramidal, trapezoidian, isoscelesian, rhomboidical.  But Lowell’s genius is infinitely pliable, accommodating itself without hesitation to the arbitrary requirements of the Sieur Spondee, and laughing in the face of the halting Dactyl.  His Birdofredom could, we doubt not, sail majestically in the clouds of a stately hexameter, make the aristocratic Alexandrine cry for quarter, and excel the old Trouveurs in the Rime equivoquee.  From the quiet esteem which his early poems and essays had won for him, he leaped at once into the high tide of popularity, and down its stream

  ‘Went sailing with vast celerity,’

with the ‘Biglow Papers’ for his sail.  This work electrified the public.  It pierced the crust of refinement and intelligence, and roused the latent laughter of its heart.  Even newsboys chuckled with delight over its caustic hits at the powers that were, against which, with the characteristic precocity of Young America, each had his private individual spite; while they found in its peculiar phraseology a mine of fun.  Patriots rejoiced that one vigilant thinker dared stand guard over our national honor, with the two-edged sword of satire in his hand.  Men in authority, at whom the shafts of its scathing rebukes were leveled, writhed on their cushions of state, while, in sheer deference to his originality and humor, they laughed with the crowd at—­themselves.  And in sooth it was a goodly sight, the young scholar, who had hitherto only dabbled delicately with the treasures of poetry, whose name was a very synonym for elegance and the repose of a genial dignity, whom we suspected of no keen outlooks into the practical world of to-day,—­to see this man suddenly flashing into the dusty arena, with indignation rustling through his veins and breathing more flame