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in Hawthorne; he writes somewhere: "The time was come for me now 

 to return to the merchants of Boston, and to the other old fogies, 

 who in this general flux and intangibility of affairs still kept a death- 

 like grip on a few plain truths, which had not been in vogue since 

 yesterday morning." 



But it was not the temperament of Plato or Lowell ; Lowell seems 

 an exception, with Praed perhaps originality as a companion- — but a 

 companion of very imperfect sympathy — for if Praed began life as a 

 reformer he soon passed over, as was to be expected of a wit, to the 

 Conservatives. 



I am trying to find other companions for Plato and Lowell, but 

 it is not easy; one indeed there is, the prince or princess of wits, 

 humourists and satirists, Jane Austen; but then is she really parallel 

 with Lowell ? She had no opportunity in her cloistered Hampshire 

 life of meeting radicals and idealists; she expended her satire, therefore, 

 on the people she saw and met, and they were all conservatives and 

 conventionalists. 



Perhaps a more promising parallel is Dickens; but then Dickens 

 was a satirist, not of types and temperaments, not of reformers and 

 idealists, or of conservatives and realists, but a satirist of individual 

 eccentricity; he painted gigantic and side-splitting posters, extravagant 

 caricatures of the monthly nurse, of his own sanguine happy-go- 

 lucky father, of the professional humbug with the good bedside man- 

 ner, of the rascally private school master; but these broad farces are 

 not photographs of temperament; and only two, out of the four illus- 

 trations I have chosen, can, even by a stretch be described as satires 

 at the expense of conservatism, at the expense of existing institutions 

 and established doctrines. 



The author of the Biglow Papers was wit, satirist and humourist, 

 yet he expended his wit on the Conservatives and Realists not on the 

 idealists of his day; and few seem to belong to his class; and Dickens 

 to belong only partially. 



I take a living author for comparison; even Mr. H. G. Wells, 

 that prophet as he seems to America, that most popular in America 

 of all satirists and humourists, even Mr. Wells — who certainly does 

 not count himself a conservative — cannot compete with Lowell in this 

 regard. There is humour and satire in Peter and Joan both at the 

 expense of idealists and reformers; and also in other passages — at 

 the expense of Tories and Conventionalists; but if intrinsically the 

 figures of Miss Phoebe Stubland and Lady Charlotte Sydenham be 

 fair targets for his shafts, yet the satire and humour directed at Miss 

 Phoebe the reformer is infinitely more entertaining, more piquant, 



