CHAPTER X

LOWELL’S EXPERIENCE AS AN EDITOR

Lowell’s whole life was a literary life, from the days of the “Boston Miscellany” and of the “Pioneer.” And I am well aware that these notes will be read with a certain special interest by young people who are asking themselves whether literature, as such, offers “a career” to those who are entering upon life.

It required much more resolution to determine on such a career in America in 1841 than it does now. I will attempt, therefore, in this paper, to bring together such illustrations of Lowell’s life as a man of letters as we may have room for, which do not specially connect themselves with the political history of the times, or with his special work as a professor in Harvard College.

In an earlier chapter I have already printed some of the pathetic memoranda which show how modestly his career began. Knowing as we do that, before he was fifty years old, this man was to rank as one of the first poets of his time, is it not pathetic to find him writing to his nearest friend to ask whether it is probable that three hundred copies of his poems can be sold?

It happened, as also has appeared in that chapter, that it was the periodical press which gave the means of physical support to the young man who was attempting this venture. In the same chapter I cited what is the really funny criticism of Willis, if he made it,—when he says that a man of genius may not be a good editor. As it happened, Lowell devoted much of his after life to the steady business of editing periodicals. I mean by this, not simply the general oversight of the plan of the journal for which he was responsible, but that diligent and tedious daily work, whether of reading manuscripts, of correcting and improving them, of correspondence with writers, and of hourly intimacy with publishers, which makes at once the drudgery and the pleasure of real editorial life. I observe that most young men and women who think they want to be “connected with the press” suppose that such a connection will simply compel them to go to the theatre every night, and to read agreeable novels and magazines all day. I have had a good deal to do with editorial life myself, and I have not found that this general impression regarding it is correct. Certainly Lowell never “got round to it.” He worked with steadfast diligence. He says in one place that he worked more than fifteen hours, on an average, every day. This means that he really read the manuscripts which he had in hand, that he really looked over the range of the world’s business to see what he wanted, and that he tried to engage such authors as were best fitted for special work in the journal for which he was engaged. His acquaintance with men and women became larger and larger as he did this, and there is many a pretty story of the encouragement which he gave to young writers at the very beginning of their career.

Thus, there was a joke afterwards between him and Mr. Aldrich. When Aldrich, somewhat timidly, sent his first poem to the “Atlantic,” Lowell at once recognized its worth, and sent to him the most cordial thanks. Many years after, Aldrich found himself, in turn, editor of the “Atlantic.” Lowell, then at the height of his reputation, sent a poem to the magazine. Aldrich had the fun to copy, in acknowledging the manuscript, the very note which Lowell wrote to him, most kindly, twenty years before, in which he recognized the value of his first contribution. Lowell came round to the office at once, and told Aldrich that he had almost determined him “to adopt a literary career.”

As the reader knows, Lowell edited the “Pioneer” for its short existence of three months.

In the summer of 1846 he agreed to write once a week, in prose or in poetry, for the “Anti-Slavery Standard,” the best of the anti-slavery journals. He was called a corresponding editor. The paper was edited by the masterly hand of Mr. Sidney Gay, afterwards the editor of the “Popular History.”

Mr. Lawrence Lowell, in his interesting memoir of the poet’s life, calls the few years from 1846 to 1850 the most active and the most happy of his life. “His happiness was, indeed, broken by the death of little Blanche, in March, 1847; but a new joy came to him in the birth of another daughter, Rose, toward the close of the year. Both grief and joy, however, seem to have stimulated his poetic feeling, and poems such as ‘The First Snowfall’ and ‘The Changeling’ show the ecstasy to which they brought his nature. During all this period he wrote incessantly, sometimes about public affairs, sometimes from a purely poetic impulse, with no direct relation to the great struggle in which he was engaged, but almost always with a stern sense of his mission as a prophet and a seer. His character no less than his poetic feeling had deepened and strengthened, and poems like ‘The Present Crisis’ attest the full maturity of his powers.”

When Phillips & Sampson established the “Atlantic Monthly,” in the autumn of 1857, he was its first regular editor; and there are some very nice letters of his in which he speaks of the somewhat sudden change in the methods of his daily life which come in as he walks along the river-bank from Elmwood and takes the street-car to the office in Boston. If there were room, I could hardly print anything more interesting than specimens of the notes which he wrote to authors. They give a very pretty picture of the watchful interest which he took in each individual number of the “Atlantic.” It is as the mother of a large family might not let her children go to a Christmas party without seeing that the hands of each one were perfectly clean, and that the collar of each one was prettier and neater than the others’. I think I may say that, in a somewhat varied experience in such matters, I have known no editor who had so close a watchful eye on the detail of the work of his journal.

This connection with the “Atlantic” lasted for four years, when James T. Fields, the prince among editors, took his place. In the year 1863, in company with his very dear friend Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, he became the editor of the “North American Review.” What this meant appears from the fact that between the years 1863 and 1877 he wrote thirty-four “articles” for the “North American,” besides as many more of what, in the language of that day, were called “critical notices.” In the “Atlantic Monthly,” between the years 1857 and 1877, he wrote one hundred and sixteen articles, prose or poetry.

There are, as I have intimated, a great many men now prominent among our men of letters who recollect Lowell gratefully as being the Beatrice who first welcomed them into this Paradise. Without attempting to name half of them, I will say that Mr. Howells, whom he welcomes so cordially in a letter which is to be found in Mr. Norton’s collection, and Mr. Aldrich, to whom I referred just now, both afterwards became editors of the “Atlantic” themselves. In their time they have passed on the welcome which the prince of American poets gave to both of them. And each of them inherited in turn the traditions of the office, as he established them.

The establishment of the “Atlantic Monthly” in the autumn of 1857 proved so fortunate an era in the history of the native literature of America that I may safely give to it a few sentences in these memorials. Lowell’s connection with that magazine enlarged very widely the circle of his friends and the range of his life.

It was, then, two or three years since the little Eden of Boston bookselling had been disturbed in its somnolence to a sudden “new departure,” if we may borrow an admirable phrase from the forgotten times when we had a mercantile marine. This “new departure” was the movement, as of a stork among a world of frogs, instituted by Phillips & Sampson, a new-born firm among booksellers.

The publishing business in Boston felt the wave of their impetuosity. It can hardly be said that the old houses waked from the decorous sleep of many years. But this new publishing house, with manners and customs wholly unknown before, suddenly appeared, to the dumb amazement of the old standbys, and to the delight and amusement of all young America, in the East.

Boston had never earned for itself its distinct position as one of the publishing centres of America. It had inherited that position without earning it. Harvard College, the Boston Athenæum, the American Academy, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the New England system of lectures, and the great free school system, which gave a liberal education to any boy who would take it,—these, all together, created a circle of authors. They created the “Monthly Anthology,” the “North American Review,” and the “Christian Examiner.” Such men as Bancroft, Prescott, Hildreth, Sparks, the Everetts, Hawthorne, Emerson, and now Lowell, came forward with books which had to be published. The loyalty of the Boston lawyers to their business, of the doctors to theirs, and of the ministers to theirs, had made it necessary that there should be printers and shops where books could be bought and sold. So the importers of English books had become, in a languid way, the publishers of books.

But they did not want to publish them. They did not expect to make money by publishing them. They did not know anything about them. Alexander Everett used to say that a bookseller was the only tradesman who knew nothing about the wares he sold. Of the Boston trade in those prehistoric days this was substantially true. But, in truth, there was not much publishing, excepting the issue of some law books and a few medical books. Hilliard & Gray, and Crocker & Brewster, attended to these affairs and cared little for any others.

Any one of the old firms regarded an author with a manuscript much as a dealer in Russian sail-cloth might regard a lady who should come into his counting-room and ask him to make her a linen handkerchief.

All of a sudden, as a wave of water might sweep over a thick, rotten ice-floe in one of Nansen’s summers, a marvelous inundation swept over this decorous imbecility. That is to say, two young men formed a “publishing firm.” They did not want to import books. They wanted to make them and to sell them.

More simply speaking, “Phillips & Sampson” appeared about the year 1843. Charles Sampson (a young man when he died in 1858) used to say that he had peddled molasses candy from a tin waiter on holidays, when he was a boy. Moses Dresser Phillips had been brought up to the retail book trade in Worcester, in the shop of Clarendon Harris, who succeeded Isaiah Thomas, the publisher of the first American Bible. I do not know how these young fellows first met each other. But it was they who taught the drowsy chiefs of the little Boston book-shops the great lesson that in a nation which had taught thirty million people how to read, there were more than five hundred people who wanted to read Emerson’s essays or Macaulay’s history.

Emerson, as has been said, had never received one cent from the publication of his essays, when Phillips & Sampson, about 1850, published “English Traits” for him. Mr. Phillips was by marriage connected with Emerson’s family, and had persuaded him to leave James Monroe and give the new book to the younger firm, now well established in business.

But this new firm meant to make books which everybody must buy, and to sell them where anybody could read. They did not pretend to retail books, any more than the Pacific Mills pretend to sell to a good housewife the material for a shirt or a sheet. They did mean to make them and to sell them to the retailers. So far as the nation at large went, or a wholesale trade with dealers anywhere, they had hardly any rivals in Boston. Opposite them was the shop of Ticknor & Fields. The young, wide-awake James T. Fields, now so well known by his charming reminiscences and other essays, had entered that shop, as “youngest boy,” in the later thirties. His broad and intelligent foresight was beginning to bear fruit. But Allen & Ticknor can hardly be numbered among publishers, and Ticknor & Fields did not exist as a firm until Cummings & Hilliard had become Hilliard & Gray. This firm published law books and medical books. Crocker & Brewster, successors to Governor Armstrong, imported and sold theological books. I bought my Hebrew Bible and my Gesenius’s Lexicon from them in 1839. But, if a man wanted one of these firms to publish a book for him, why, they would have told him that he must pay for his plates and his printing. Thus Mr. Bancroft, fortunately for himself, owned the plates and the printed copies of his own History from 1833 until he died.

Charles Sampson and Moses Dresser Phillips made an admirable combination, and the early death of both of them made a break in the book business of Boston which it did not easily recover from. These young men were not satisfied with the gilt-edged retail “trade” of Boston and Cambridge. They went far afield with their wares. Mr. Phillips used to tell with glee the story of their first orders from San Francisco in the ’49 days. “So many hundred packs of ‘Highland’ cards, so many of the ‘True Thomas’ cards, and so on till the box was nearly full, and then ‘one dozen Bibles.’”

This was seed-corn, he said. And then, in 1852 or 1853, he would read you their last invoices, as they answered immense orders from California. “Four hundred Byron’s Poems, four hundred Scott’s Poems, one hundred Cowper’s Poems,” and so on, in large shipments. And he would say, “That is the crop that comes from the twelve Bibles. Such editions of the poets,” he would say, “as you would not have seen in your house,—but, after all, Cowper is Cowper, and Scott is Scott.”

Both these men were resolute to meet the people halfway. Both of them were Democrats in partisan connection, not because they believed in the heresies of such men as Polk and Dallas, but because they believed in the People. There was nothing of the white-kid glove, gilt-edged paper, “u in honour” nonsense about them. Naturally, such believers as they were regarded as unorthodox in the trade of that day.

Their great onslaught on decorous publishing was made when they printed and sold Macaulay’s History for fifty cents a volume at retail.

Such a firm as this won its way up from selling books at auction, at retail, on winter evenings, to publishing large editions and placing them everywhere in America. And when the fullness of time for such an enterprise came, they determined to publish “The Atlantic Monthly.” The plan was matured in the autumn of 1857. Through the kindness of a friend, I am able to reprint here Mr. Phillips’s own description, at the time, of a famous dinner in which the enterprise was first announced—I ought not to say in public, for this was a private dinner. But I may say that that dinner-party was the first of a series which the Saturday Club of Boston has held from that day to this day. Mr. Phillips wrote, “I must tell you about a little dinner-party I gave about two weeks ago. It would be proper, perhaps, to state that the origin of it was a desire to confer with my literary friends on a somewhat extensive literary project, the particulars of which I shall reserve till you come. But to the party: My invitations included only R.W. Emerson, H.W. Longfellow, J.K. Lowell, Mr. Motley (the ‘Dutch Republic’ man), O.W. Holmes, Mr. Cabot, and Mr. Underwood, our literary man. Imagine your uncle as the head of such a table, with such guests. The above named were the only ones invited, and they were all present. We sat down at three P.M., and rose at eight. The time occupied was longer by about four hours and thirty minutes than I am in the habit of consuming in that kind of occupation, but it was the richest time intellectually by all odds that I have ever had. Leaving myself and ‘literary man’ out of the group, I think you will agree with me that it would be difficult to duplicate that number of such conceded scholarship in the whole country beside.

“Mr. Emerson took the first post of honor at my right, and Mr. Longfellow the second at my left. The exact arrangement of the table was as follows:

Mr. Underwood. Cabot. Lowell. Motley. Holmes. Longfellow. Emerson. Phillips.

“They seemed so well pleased that they adjourned, and invited me _to meet them_ again to-morrow, when I shall again meet the same persons, with one other (Whipple, the essayist) added to that brilliant constellation of philosophical, poetical, and historical talent. Each one is known alike on both sides of the Atlantic, and is read beyond the limits of the English language. Though all this is known to you, you will pardon me for intruding it upon you. But still I have the vanity to believe that you will think them the most natural thoughts in the world to me. Though I say it that should not, it was the proudest day of my life.”

In this letter he does not tell of his own little speech, made at the launch. But at the time we all knew of it. He announced the plan of the magazine by saying, “Mr. Cabot is much wiser than I am. Dr. Holmes can write funnier verses than I can. Mr. Motley can write history better than I. Mr. Emerson is a philosopher and I am not. Mr. Lowell knows more of the old poets than I.” But after this confession he said, “But none of you knows the American people as well as I do.”

This was the truth, and they knew it was the truth. The “Atlantic,” at that moment, asserted its true place. It was not “The _Boston_ Miscellany;” it was the journal for the nation, which at that time had no Pacific slope which needed to be named.

Yet I have guessed that, in the fact that “the Atlantic States” were then contributing the capital and the men who were forming the Pacific States, we find the origin of the very fortunate name of the magazine. The civilization of the smaller Atlantic basin was beginning to assert itself in that great Pacific basin which implies, when we speak of it, half the surface of the world. And of such an assertion the “Atlantic” was to be the mouthpiece. But this is my guess only. I never talked with him about the name, and I do not know who suggested it. No man then thought of the Philippines.

I always thought that, at the beginning, Mr. Phillips meant to edit the magazine himself. I do not believe that it occurred to him, before he began, that a magazine office is a place to which every prophet, every poet, and every fool in the land thinks he may send what he chooses to write, and supposes that he is “entitled” to have it read, not to say printed and circulated. I think he thought he was to ask John, James, and the others, for whom he was publishing books, to send articles fit for the magazine, as Mr. Prescott, for instance, sent a chapter of his “Charles the Fifth.” He did not think that Tom, Dick, or Harry had any “rights” in the business. Perhaps Mr. Underwood or some one in the office was to read the proofs.

But very soon this simple Arcadian notion vanished. And very soon Lowell was the working editor of the magazine.

Let me say a word about any presumption that Lowell was a mere figurehead, and that some one else did the work. Trust me, for I know. I have worked under many editors, good and bad. Not one of them understood his business better than Lowell, or worked at its details more faithfully. I think he hated to read manuscripts as much as any man of sense does. In those days there was practically no typewriting. I think that, like any man of sense, he would prefer to write an article than to read the average “contribution.” But he had said he would do it, and he did it—up to time, so far as I have seen, careful in detail even to the least detail, and he had no reason to be ashamed of his work when he was done.

In those days people of literary aspirations, especially young people, read the English magazines almost religiously. Indeed, “Blackwood” and “Frazer” and sometimes the “Dublin University Magazine” were worth reading. I am afraid that, for all I have said or implied about the American or Atlantic basis of the new magazine, the original cover was, in a way, an imitation of “Blackwood.” The color was, as it is, a sort of tawny brown. It was more tawny then than it is now. Did it just suggest the “tawny lion pawing to be free”? I do not think Phillips thought of this. Perhaps Holmes and Lowell did. Where “Blackwood’s Magazine” had and has a medallion head of somebody, we put on the cover of our “maga” the head of John Winthrop, from the old portrait said to be by Vandyke,—I do not know why.

Now this was as bad a mistake as the New Yorkers made in calling their magazine the “Knickerbocker.” That is, it gave a local emblem to a national magazine. John Winthrop was a great man. But his greatness belonged to Massachusetts, and not to the nation. West of the Hudson River there were not a thousand men in the country who knew anything about him.

But this mistake was not held to. After two years the “Atlantic” had full reason to show that it stood, not for Massachusetts, but for “We, the People of the United States.” And the national flag was substituted for the head of a Massachusetts governor. Why it was taken off, I never knew; I doubt if any one else does. One is pleased to see, as this sheet passes the press, that it has appeared again.[8]

In the war the magazine was loyal from hub to tire. Some capital contributions to history are embalmed in it. I remember the late Caleb William Loring’s excellent paper on Antietam, a good companion to Dr. Holmes’s “Hunt after the Captain.”

It may be amusing to preserve one or two reminiscences of the delay with which magazines then appeared, at which writers meekly complained.

The admirable Theodore Winthrop was killed in a miserable outpost skirmish above Hampton. Then, and, alas! not till then, the “Atlantic people” remembered that they had some excellent manuscripts of his, which had been seasoning in the safe, doubtless paid for when they were accepted, but “crowded out” till then. Then they were pushed into type as soon as might be. But death came before the “Atlantic” took the credit, which it deserved, of discovering the author.

I tell this, with some venom, because I myself suffered a little from what Hamlet should have called the pangs of delay of magazine men. I had written for the Ohio canvass of September, 1863, a story called “The Man without a Country.” It was “rushed through,” that it might be in time to defeat Vallandigham in the election of October. And by such swiftness of proofs and revises, unexampled before, it got itself printed in the December number of the same year, when poor Vallandigham had been well beaten and forgotten!

Ah, youngsters of 1898, how little do you know of what you enjoy in these days of “quick proofs, no revises, fast coaches.” The true rule for an editor is to send back to each author every manuscript which he has by him, and to trust to February to fill the appetite of March. One does not care to have his eggs too old.

It is to go back a little from the birthday of the “Atlantic” to speak of the first of the “Biglow Papers” ten years before. The series ran for nearly four years.

It was in June, 1846, in face of the almost unanimous hatred of the Mexican War among Massachusetts people, that a regiment was raised in Boston and the neighborhood for that war. Lowell saw a recruiting officer in the street, and was roused to much the sort of wrath which fired the average Boston gentleman in 1773 when he saw a “lobsterback” loafing in the same street with as little reason. Lowell wrote for the “Courier” what he calls “a squib,” which was the first of the “Biglow Papers.” Mr. Lawrence Lowell reminds us that he did not follow up its success at once. The third paper was published a year and a half after the first. After this the poems of the first series appeared in rapid succession.

In the period between the middle of 1847 and the end of 1849 he wrote most of the “Biglow Papers” of that series, he continued his regular work for the “Standard,” and wrote the “Fable for Critics” and the “Vision of Sir Launfal.” Mr. Lawrence Lowell says that the last was written in forty-eight hours, during which he scarcely slept or ate; and he considers it the most generally popular of the poet’s longer poems.

Success gave him new stimulus, and in a happy home he worked with all the help which love and true sympathy could give him. To enter into the spirit of that life, one must make real what Mr. Lawrence Lowell has so well expressed. “He was, no doubt, to some extent a martyr for his political opinions, but no martyr was ever so high-spirited, so jovial, and so charming. As he said himself, he was curiously compounded of two utterly distinct characters. One half was clear mystic and enthusiast, the other humorist; and the humor, which is the best balance-wheel vouchsafed to man, prevented his remaining narrow or fanatical.”

“On July 1, 1851, he embarked on a sailing vessel for Genoa, and passed most of the following year in Italy. A great part of the year was spent in Rome, with his lifelong friend, William Wetmore Story.” But the charm of the earlier years was broken. His little Rose died in 1850; Walter, his only son, died two years later; Mrs. Lowell’s health, always delicate, gave way, and she died in 1853, on the 27th of October, after they had returned to America.

His duty as professor at Cambridge began in September, 1856. Of some details in his discharge of this I have spoken in another chapter. He would refer, sometimes, to a certain “numbness” in literary effort which came from the monotony of a teacher’s duties. But, as Mr. Lawrence Lowell says, when we remember that most of his prose books were written in the twenty years of his professorship, that in the same time he wrote “The Cathedral,” the second series of the “Biglow Papers,” the great “Commemoration Ode,” and several of his best shorter poems, we feel that we must not take too seriously what he said of the numbing effect of the class-room.

Of “The Cathedral,” after nearly thirty years, I may perhaps mention a contemporary criticism. When it was published, I was the editor of “Old and New.” My theory was, and is, that generally a book should be reviewed by some one in sympathy with the author. So I sent “The Cathedral” to Mr. Waldo Emerson, hoping that he would write a review of it for our magazine. He returned the book the next day, saying that he could not write the article. When I met him next, I expressed my regret; and the philosopher said simply, “But, I _like_ Lowell, I like Lowell.” To which I replied, “Yes, and you like the poem, do you not?” “I like it—yes; but I think he had to pump.” The figure is best understood by those of us who know the difference between “striking oil” and digging an artesian well for it and putting in valves and pistons with a steam-engine. Probably Lowell would have enjoyed the criticism as much as any one.

Lowell’s own inside view of editing, and of the “Atlantic,” the early career of which he directed, peeps out again and again in his letters. If it were well to print here some of his private notes to contributors, they would, as I have intimated, show an almost motherly care of the new-born magazine. The first number is dated December, 1857, and in that month he writes, “Even the Magazine has its compensations.” Let the reader remember that the new duty he has undertaken, the “avocation,” is superimposed on his “vocation,”—the regular work of a full college professor. “First, it has almost got me out of debt, and, next, it compels me into morning walks to the printing-office. [This was the Riverside Press, not far from the college.] There is a little foot-path which leads along the river-bank, and it is lovely, whether in clear, cold mornings, when the fine filaments of the bare trees on the horizon seem floating up like sea-mosses in the ether sea, or when (as yesterday) a gray mist fills our Cambridge cup, and gives a doubtful loom to its snowy brim of hills, while the silent gulls wheel over the nestling cakes of ice which the Charles is whirling seaward.”

If other editors had a morning walk like this, and had the eyes to see and the ears to hear, it might be well for other readers.

When one remembers that the Autocrat’s papers were going on in the “Atlantic” at this time, that Motley and Prescott were publishing bits of their histories in it, that Longfellow wrote almost regularly in these numbers, and that younger writers, now well known, were winning their spurs in these first two volumes, it is easy to see that the work of the editor, who was easily chief among them, was interesting and inspiring to him. People were not then used to such papers as his on Choate and Cushing. He writes this scrap in October, 1858:—

“Phillips was so persuaded of the stand given to the Magazine by the Choate article that he has been at me ever since for another. So I have been writing a still longer one on Cushing. I think you will like it,—though on looking over the Choate article I am inclined to think that, on the whole, the better of the two.

“The worst [of editing] is that it leads me to bore my friends when I do get at them. To be an editor is almost as bad as being President.”

To Mr. Higginson, then forty years younger than he is now, he says, “As for your own contributions, I may say to you, as I always have to Mr. Underwood, that they are just to my liking,—scholarly, picturesque, and, above all, earnest,—I think the most _telling_ essays we have printed.”

And when he resigns the charge to his friend Fields—his warm friend till death—in May, 1861: “I was going to say I was glad to be rid of my old man of the sea. But I don’t believe I am. A bore that is periodical gets a friendly face at last, and we miss it on the whole....

“Well, good-by—delusive royalty! I abdicate with what grace I may. I lay aside my paper crown and feather sceptre.”

And in the same note he says he shall always gladly do what he can for the “Atlantic,” a promise which he well fulfilled. The second series of the “Biglow Papers” was published there.

* * * * *

In a way, perhaps, he had a right to feel that he, earlier than any one else, had the credit for the first fortunes of the “Atlantic,” and to be proud of them. To become the editor of the aged “North American,” hand in hand with his near friend Mr. Norton, was a wholly different thing.

I am sure that there is somewhere, among his by-letters, an outburst as to what he will do “if he shall ever edit the ‘North American.’” I think most youngsters of his time—who were born with a pen in hand—indulged in the same dream, if they were bred within sound of the college bell at Cambridge.

In those prehistoric days the “North American,” to the notions of the few hundred people who had ever heard of it, was wholly different from what any journal is now to any reader. Four times a year only—quarterly!—think of that, young contributors to to-day’s “Atlantic” who can hardly live three weeks, to know if that horrid man has refused your poem, or if that charming and sensible editor has printed it! Read Mrs. Lyman’s Life, or any other good sketch of New England life in the twenties of this century, and see how people wrote or spoke of the arrival of the new “North American,” with the interest with which the inhabitants of Saturn might speak of the regular decennial fall of some well-timed aerolite!

The “North American” is now so different from what it was in 1864, when Lowell took charge of it with Mr. Norton, that its accomplished editor will pardon me if I say ten words more about its infant issues, to the young writers of this generation. It was founded—modestly, yes, but with determination—among a little confident circle of the well-trained young men of Boston, at a moment when Boston counted, perhaps, fifty thousand people. These were people who had time to read, and time to write, and thought themselves, strange to say, the rivals and equals of anybody in the world. The quarterly was the then regnant fashion. The Edinburgh “Quarterly,” the London “Quarterly,” were the arrogant dictators of English literature. “Go to, now! We will dictate also! We will have a ‘Quarterly’ of our own!” For one, I like what the vernacular calls the “dander” of that determination.

And some plucky and loyal bits of good American sentiment and statement got themselves into the juvenile “North American.” But it was awfully proper. Its editors were more anxious about making their “Quarterly” respectable in the eyes of their ten English readers than of the thousand American readers, more or less, who paid them five dollars a year for their editing.

Now the remainder of the people of England and of the people of America did not know that any such “Quarterly” existed. There had never risen for it any publisher who “knew the American people.”

In one of the changes of literary “property,” the dwindling “list” of the now venerable Review fell into the hands of people who had courage to give Norton and Lowell the charge of it. Soon after, Fields, Osgood & Co. bought the Review.

“Norton and I have undertaken to edit the ‘North American,’” Lowell writes. “A rather Sisyphean job, you will say. It wanted three chief elements to be successful. It wasn’t thoroughly, that is, thick and thinly, loyal; it wasn’t lively; and it had no particular opinions on any particular subject. It was an eminently safe periodical, and accordingly was in great danger of running aground.”

To this “eminently safe” journal Mr. Norton and Lowell undertook to give loyalty and life. To the little circle which followed in the steps, now faltering, of the Mutual Admiration Club, they added contributors from all latitudes and longitudes. Thus the new departure is marked by letters asking for articles,—to Motley in Vienna, Howells in Venice, Stedman, who was a new writer for them; and, as the reader has seen, Lowell’s own work was in amount what one would hardly have wished for had the Review furnished his only occupation.

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