In quite another vein, yet transfused with the same irrepressible mirth, we have Lowell’s ‘Fable for Critics,’ which, with its ’preliminary notes and few candid remarks to the reader,’ is a literary curiosity whose parallel we have not in any work by an American author.  It is all one merry outburst of youth and health, and music and poetry, with the spice of a criticism so rare and genial, that one could almost court dissection at his hands, for the mere exquisitely epicurean bliss of an artistic euthanasia.  It is genius on a frolic, coquetting with all the Graces, and unearthing men long since become gnomes,

            ’In that country
  Where are neither stars nor meadows,’

to join in his merry carousing.  They float on floods of Chian and moor their barks under ‘hills of spice.’  What golden wine of inspiration has our poet drunk, whose flush is on his brow and its fire in his veins?  For every sentence of this poem is aglow with vigor and life and power;

‘Its feeldes have een and its woodes have eeres.’

And if he sometimes stumbles over a metre or lets his private friendships and preferences run away with his cool discretion and judgment, why, bonus dormitat Homerus, let us, like the miser Euclio, be thankful for the good the gods vouchsafe us.  Taken in themselves and without regard to their poetical surroundings, no more comprehensive, faithful, concise portraitures of our authors have ever been produced.  They unite in the highest degree candor and justice, and there is withal a tone so kindly and a wit so pure, that we almost believe him to be describing a community of brothers affiliated by the close ties of deep mutual appreciation.  He flings his diamonds of learning upon the page, and we recognize the scholar whom no extravagance in knowledge can make bankrupt.  We seem to have come by rare chance upon one of those wardrobes of the early kings, wherein are all savory treasures,—­the rose and violet colored sugars of Alexandria, sweet almonds, and sharp-toothed ginger.  We pardon his puns, indeed we believe them to be inevitable, the flash of the percussion cap, the sparks of electricity, St. Elmo’s stars, phosphorescent gleams, playing over the restless ocean of his fruitful imagination.  And we are persuaded that if the venerable Democritus (who was uncanonized only because the Holy See was still wavering, an anomalous body, in Weissnichtwo, and who existed forty days on the mere sight of bread and honey) had been regaled with the piquant delicacies of Lowell’s picture of a Critic, he might have continued unto this present.  It is a satire so pleasantly constructed, so full of palpable hits at the ‘musty dogmas’ of the day, so rich in mirthful allusion, and with such a generously insinuated tribute to the true and earnest-hearted critic, that we know not which most to admire, the sketch, or the soul whence it emanated.  The following description of a ‘regular heavy reviewer’ is complete: