JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

IT is a hundred years to-day since James Russell Lowell was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts. We are glad to know that the American Academy at New York is doing honour to his memory, and that it has invited British and Canadian men of letters to take part in the four days' celebration, for Lowell was-one of the most charming writers that America has produced, and he typified in a peculiar degree the essential unity of the English-speaking peoples. He came of a good English stock, tracing his descent from a Percival Lowell who in 1639 preferred the freedom of Puritan Massachusetts to the tyranny of King Charles. His grandfather took an active part in the Colonial Revolution, but that did not prevent his father from coming to the Old Country to study at Edinburgh. Lowell's mother, too, came of a British family. He was educated, of course, at Harvard, the ancient foundation which long pre- served the distinctively English and Puritan atmosphere of its early days. In after years he succeeded Longfellow as Professor of Modern Languages and Belles Lettres—a delightfully com- prehensive title for a Chair which suggests in itself as leisurely and old-fashioned a curriculum as Oxford or Cambridge enjoyed sixty years since. When Lowell, after fifteen strenuous years as editor first of the Atlantic Monthly and then of the Nora American Review, and three placid years in the Embassy at Madrid, came at last to London as the United States Minister, he felt, and said, that he was returning to the "old home," A generation has passed since his five years' term of office here, which coincided with Mr. Gladstone's second Ministry and the Irish imbroglio that affected America in no small degree. But many people will remember with pleasure the happy impression produced on the British public by an American Minister who was emphatically a scholar as well ass gentleman, who was proud of his English ancestry and his English literary connexions, and whose avowed purpose was to bring the two peoples nearer together and to efface the passing estrangement caused by episodes of the Civil War. Lowell was well Lmown to us as an author before he came as Minister. His Biglom Payers and My Study Windows were familiar to English readers, and Cam- bridge had given him an honorary degree in 1874. But long before he left the Embassy he had become a popular figure in English public life, setting an example which his successors have followed to the great advantage of both countries. He was an ideal liaison officer for the forces of good in Great Britain and America.

No American was ever more sympathetic towards us than Lowell, but none was more devoted to America. In the true spirit of his New England ancestors, he was content to share our common civilization, but he was prompt always to assert his country's independence. His great work, The Biglow Papery which will be read and quoted when his pleasant verse and graceful essays are forgotten, was essentially American, racy of the soil in its pungent directness no less than in its Yankee dialect. Political satire in verse has not been practised in England with much success since the Augustan Age, and the examples which are still current, such as Canning's "Friend of Humanity and the Needy Knife-grinder," are few indeed. Yet here was an American writing political satires on the Mexican War, the anti-slavery agitation, and the Civil War, which, despite their many obscure political allusions and their difficult

dialect, are still read with pleasure after sixty years on this side of the Atlantic and are quoted almost as freely as any of our Middle Victorians. The bare fact of his survival shows Lowell to have been a satirist of very exceptional talent. If we probe into the reason why The Biglow Papers have this lasting attract- iveness, we shall find it in the skill with which Lowell touched on the general foibles of politicians and journalists in the course of his versified comment on particular events, as well in the flow of witty phrases which stick in the memory, like the refrain of :— " Parson Wilbur sec he never heard in his life Thet th' Apostles rigged out in their swatter tail coats, An' marched round in front of a drum an' a fife, To git some on 'em office, an' some on 'em votes ; But John P.

Robinson he Sea they didn't know everythin' down in Jules."

The complaint of a good party man against a legislator who had set principle above party in a forgotten crisis of 1847 ceases to be local or temporary when he goes on to say :— " We were ready to vote fer whoever wuz eligible, Ef on all pints at issoo he'd stay unintelligible. Wal, sposire we had to gulp clown our perfessions, We were ready to come out next mornin' with fresh ones ; Besides, of we did. 'twos our business alone, For couldn't we In wut we would with our own An' of a man can, wen pervisigas hey tie so, Eat up his own words, it's a mercy it is so."

Nor is " The Pious Editor's Creed," one of the gems of the collection, by any means so obsolete as one could wish, though the creed is not by any means confined to journalists :— "I du believe in Freedom's cause, Es fur away oz Payria is ; I love to see her stick her claws In them infarnal Phayriaees ; It's seal enough agin a king To dror resolves an' triggers, But libbaty's a kind o' thing Thet, don't agree with niggers."

We still have many a candidate who could say, if he were

candid:—

"Es to my princerples, I glory In hymn nothin' o' the sort ; I aint a Wig, I aint a Tory, I'm jest a candidate, in short."

When the Honourable Preserved Doe in secret caucus said :— " A girsooine statesman should be on his guard,

Ef he roust hev beliefs, nut to b'lieve 'em to hard "-

he was enunciating a first principle of the baser sort of politi- cians in all times. Lowell was a humorist and a profound philosopher too.

In this country we naturally take a special interest in the later Biglow Papers relating to the Civil War, because the attitude of Great Britain concerned the satirist, in common with the rest of his fellow-Northerners. It is always pleasant to remember that, in the midst of the uproar caused by the Trent' affair and the British protest at the seizure of the Confederate envoys in a British mail-steamer, Lowell kept his head and expressed his disapproval of our official action in verses which, though satirical, could not wound. His imaginary dialogue between the excited Concord Bridge and the more temperate Monument —" the Stone Spike thet's druv thru Bunker's Hill "—put both sides of the case at a critical moment, and must have helped to dissolve the Northern anger in laughter. The Monu- ment was for a friendly settlement of the dispute with Great Britain on the ground that "She an C'olumby's gut to be fas' friends." It was not till he had thus smoothed the way in his introduction and his dialogue that Lowell let himself go in the vivacious " Jonathan to John," of which we may give two verses;—

"It don't seem hardly right, John, When both my hands was full, To stump me to a fight, John,— Your cousin, tu, John Bull !

Ole Uncle S. see he, I guess We know it now,' sez he, ' The lion's paw is all the law, Accordin' to J. B., That's fit for you an' me ! '

• We own the ocean, tic, John You naus'n' take it hard, Ef we can't think with you, John, It's jest your own back-yard.

Ole Uncle S. sez he, ' 1 guest,

If there his claim,' sez ho, ' The fencin'stuff'll cost enough To bust up friend J. B., Es wal ez you an' me ! ' "

The last verse, we may note, has a very modern application in Mr. Daniels's new Navy Bill. It is instructive to notice how Lowell had hardened under the stress of civil war in his attach.

ment to the Union. In 1846 he had suggeated that it would be better for the South to go its own way rather than prolong the controversy about slavery; "Ef I'd my way I hod rather We should go to work an' part, They take one way, we take (other, Guess it wouldn't break my heart."

But when the war came he was dead against 'the " Critters yit that talk an' act Fer wut they call Conciliation ; They'd hand a bufrlo drove a tract When they yam madder than all Basilan.

Conciliation It jest means be kicked."

In the gloomy days of December, 1882, when the war had gone badly for the North, he despaired for a moment of Lincoln in what is perhaps the only cruel verse in the Papers :- " More men Moro Man ! It's there we fail ; Weak plans grow weaker yit by lengthenin' : Wut use M addin' to the tail, When it's the head's in need o' strengthenia' We wanted one that felt all Chief From roots o' hair to sole o' stockin, Square-sot with thousraiden belief In him an' us, of earth went rockiii."

But he comforted himself later in the same poem with the hope that " Abe's gut his will et last bloom-furnaced In trial flames till it'll stand The strain o' bein' in deadly earnest," and urged his countrymen to believe " in Freedom cc Jeff done in Slavery.* Many of us in the worst days of this war have been etimulated as well as amused by Lowell's courageous optimism when his country was passing through its greatest trial. A satirist who appeals to a later generation with such force and wit as he shows deserves to be remembered to-day on both sides of the Atlantic.