‘Than ten fire-kings could swallow,’

scorching with his burning words, which an inimitable carelessness made doubly effective, the willful absurdities of government and the palpable wrongs of society, to question which had seemed before almost a heresy.  But Lowell’s humor was the chrism, snatching together parallels whose apparent inequalities, yet real justice, were powerfully convincing.  He never sought the inconsistencies of his subject, they flocked to meet him uninvited.  And his infinite cheerfulness, his freedom, even in his most daring onslaughts, from ill-nature, these were the influences meet,

  ‘That bowed our hearts like barley bending.’

Scarcely did we know our knight in his new armor.  Off with the hauberk and visor, down with the glittering shield of his mediaeval crusade, and, lo! with his hand on the plow and his eyes on the fair fields of his own New England, our country boy sings his Ave Aquila! while other men are rubbing the sunbeams of of the new-born day into their sleepy eyes.

And it was not alone in our own country that this newly developed phase of our poet’s genius was acknowledged and applauded.  Says a British Review, with an admiration whose reservations are unfortunately too just to be disputed:  ’All at once we have a batch of small satirists,—­Mr. Bailey at their head,—­in England, and one really powerful satirist in America, namely, Mr. J.R.  Lowell, whose “Biglow Papers” we most gladly welcome as being not only the best volume of satires since the Anti-Jacobin, but also the first work of real and efficient poetical genius which has reached us from the United States.  We have been under the necessity of telling some unpleasant truths about American literature from time to time, and it is with hearty pleasure that we are now able to own that the Britishers have been for the present utterly and apparently hopelessly beaten by a Yankee in one important department of poetry.  In the United States, social and political evils have a breadth and tangibility which are not at present to be found in the condition of any other civilized country.  The “peculiar domestic institution,” the fillibustering tendencies of the nation, the charlatanism which is the price of political power, are butts for the shafts of the satirist, which European poets may well envy Mr. Lowell.  We do not pretend to affirm that the evils of European society may not be as great in their own way as those which affect the credit of the United States, with the exception, of course, of slavery, which makes American freedom deservedly the laughing-stock of the world; but what we do say is, that the evils in point have a boldness and simplicity which our more sophisticated follies have not, and that a hundred years hence Mr. Lowell’s Yankee satires will be perfectly intelligible to every one.’

The predictions of the English reviewer are fulfilled already.  The prescribed century has not elapsed, and in a decade the ‘Yankee satires’ are comprehended as perhaps even their author failed to comprehend as he created them.  There is something positively startling and uncanny in his prophetic insight into the passions that have attained their majority in this present year of grace,—­passions that,