It is no trifling merit in a work of so extraordinary a character that the original programme should have been so perfectly carried out.  The poet never relaxes, even into a Corinthian elegance of allusion; his metaphors are always fresh and ungarnished; they no more shine with the polish of the court than do those of Panurge.  In fact, there is a flavor of the camp about them, a pleasant suspicion, and more than a suspicion, of life in the open air, the fresh smell of the up-turned earth, the odor of clover blossoms.  The poet is walking in the fresco, and the sharp winds cut a pathway across every page.  Equally remarkable and pervaded by a most delightful personality are the editorial lucubrations of the Rev. Homer Wilbur.  The very lustre of the midnight oil shines upon their glittering fragments of philosophy, admirably twisted to suit the requirements of an eminently unphilosophical age; moral axioms from heathen writers applied judiciously to the immoral actions of Christian doers; distorted shadows of a monstrous political economy, and dispassionate and highly commendable views ‘de propaganda fide.’  Like Johnson,

  ’He forced Latinisms into his line,
  Like raw undrilled recruits,’

that have yet done immense service in his conflicts with the enemy.  This pedantry, so inimitable, is unequaled even by the most weighty pages of the ‘Pseudodoxia Epidemica’ of Sir Thomas Browne.  That it should prove obnoxious to some critics only testifies to its perfection and their own incapacity for enjoyment.  If a man does not relish the caviare and truffles at a dinner, he does not question the wisdom of his Lucullus in providing them; the fault is in his own palate, not in the judgment of his host.  The aggrieved individuals, who are either too weak or too indolent to scale the numberless peaks of Lowell’s genius, may comfort themselves with the reflection that the treasures of their minds will never be tesselated into the mosaic of any satirist’s fancy, for in them can abound only emptiness and cobwebs—­as saith the Staphyla of Plautus:—­

  ’Nam hic apud nos nihil est aliud qua sti furibus,
  Ita inaniis sunt oppletae atque araneis.’

Caricatures have never been disdained by the greatest minds.  They were rather the healthful diversion of their leisure hours.  Even the stern and rugged-natured artist, Annibale Caracci, was famous for his humorous inventions, and the good Leonardo da Vinci esteemed them as most useful exercises.  We all remember the group of the Laocoon that Titian sketched with apes, and those whole humorous poems in lines found in Herculaneum, where Anchises and AEneas are represented with the heads of apes and pigs.  Lessing even tells us in his Laocoon that in Thebes the rage for these caricatura was so great that a law was passed forbidding the production of any work conflicting with the severe and absolute laws of beauty.