428 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 



and was iudeed for a while a corresponding editor; but in June, 

 1846, there appeared one day in the Boston Courier a letter from 

 Mr. Ezekiel Biglow of Jalaam to the Hon. Joseph T. Buckingham, 

 editor of the Boston Courier, enclosing a poem of his son, Mr. 

 Hosea Biglow. It was no new thing to seek to arrest the public 

 attention with the vernacular applied to public affairs. Major Jack 

 Downing and Sam Slick had been notable examples, and they had 

 many imitators ; but the reader who laughed over the racy narrative of 

 the unlettered Ezekiel, and then took up Hosea's poem and caught 

 the gust of Yankee wrath and humor blown fresh in his face, knew 

 that he was in with the appearance of something new in American 

 literature. A score of years afterward, when introducing the Second 

 Series of "The Biglow Papers," Lowell confessed that when he wrote 

 this letter and poem he had no definite plan, and no intention of ever 

 writing another. It was struck out from him by the revolt of his 

 nature at the iniquity of slavery and the war into which slavery was 

 dragging the nation. But he adds, " The success of my experiment 

 soon began not only to astonish me, but to make me feel the responsi- 

 bility of knowing that I held in my band a weapon, instead of the 

 mere fencing stick I had supposed. ... If I put on the cap and bells, 

 and made myself one of the court fools of King Demos, it was less to 

 make his Majesty laugh than to win a passage to his royal ears for 

 certain serious things which I had deeply at heart." 



"The Biglow Papers " not only gave Lowell to himself and opened 

 the flood gates of his patriotism and his noble indignation ; they gave 

 him a public, and thus furnished the complement which every author 

 demands. " Very far," he says, in the same Introduction, " from 

 being a popular author under my own name, so far, indeed, as to be 

 almost unread, I found the verses of my pseudonym copied every- 

 where ; I saw them pinned up in workshops ; I heard them quoted 

 and their authorship debated." The force which he displayed in these 

 satires made his book at once a powerful ally of a sentiment which 

 heretofore had been ridiculed ; it turned the tables and put Anti- 

 slavery, which had been fighting sturdily on foot with pikes, into the 

 saddle, and gave it a flashing sabre. For Lowell himself it won an 

 accolade from King Demos. He rose up a knight, and thenceforth 

 possessed a freedom which was a freedom of nature, not a simple 

 badge of service in a single cause. His patriotism and moral fervor 

 found other vents in later life, and he never laid down the sword 

 which he then took up, but it is significant of the stability of his 

 genius that he was not misled by the sudden distinction which came 



