xii INTRODUCTION. 



into energy by Texan annexations, Mexican wars, Fugitive 

 Slave Bills, and the other too abundant evidences of subserviency 

 to the slave power and general political demoralisation, so rife 

 at that unhappy period. At the same time, there was nothing 

 in Mr. Lowell in the slightest degree tasteless, absurd, or 

 fanatical. He impressed the conviction that he was not only 

 much better than the professional politicians of his day, but 

 also much wiser. The same sanity characterises his deliver 

 ances as a critic. He is original to a much higher degree than 

 the Irvings and the Ticknors, and his originality is of a dis 

 tinctively national type. But he has not that disengagement 

 from all traditional and conventional influences sometimes real, 

 sometimes affected which characterises or is assumed by 

 younger men. He is free from their extravagance, but he does 

 not succeed so often in setting old things in a new light. 

 Hence the English reader will find him less suggestive and 

 stimulating than a Greek might have found a Roman, if he had 

 condescended to study the latter. He is like an English fruit 

 transplanted, racy, it may be said, of the new soil, but not 

 endowed with the full flavour of an indigenous product. 



As his own Fable for Critics foreshadowed what might come 

 of satire applied to politics : so his criticisms hint what service 

 American culture may render to English letters when it has 

 obtained an entirely independent point of view. That it has 

 not yet done so is recognised by Mr. Lowell himself in his 

 essay on Josiah Quincy, in language perhaps even stronger 

 than altogether justified by the circumstances. It may almost 

 be suggested that he writes as a New Englander, and that a 

 citizen of the Great West, while allowing with him that America 

 &quot;must submit herself to the European standard of intellectual 

 weights and measures,&quot; would claim that she had earned the 

 right to apply them in her own way to the estimate of other 

 nations products and her own. Such intellectual standards are 

 in a measure elastic. There is but one manner of weighing tea 

 all the world over, but the literary balance, though graduated on 

 the same principles, must inevitably yield various results. 



The essay from which this quotation is taken belongs to the 



