PS 2322 
 
 .D4 
 1898 
 Copy 1 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2011 with funding from 
 The Library of Congress 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/democracyotherpaOOIowe 
 
Issued Monthly 
 September to June 
 
 Number J23 
 
 March 2, 1898 
 
 yw fwwi 
 
 ■m-mam 
 
 iiiiHtiiir/smtfrMHiivuuv 
 
 Single Numbers FIFTEEN CENTS Tri D !e Numbers FORTY-FIVE C£nTS 
 
 Double Numbers THIRTY CENTS Quadruple Numbers FIFTY CENTS 
 
 Yearly Subscription (9 Numbers) $1.35 t _ , 
 
 t i-Lvs 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 
 
 d Sounds. 
 
 • 
 
 €l)e lKiker£tt>e literature ^erte^ 
 
 With Introductions, Notes, Historical Sketches, and Biographical Sketches. 
 Each regular single number, paper, 15 cents. 
 
 1 Longfellow's Evangeline.* %\ u «, * 
 
 2 Longfellow's Courtsnip of Miles Standish ; Elizabeth* 
 
 3 Longfellow's Courtship of Miles Standish Dramatized. 
 
 4 Whittier's Saow-Bound, and Other Poems * %% ** 
 
 5 Whittier's Mabel Martin, aad Other Ppem^;* 
 
 6 Holmes's Grandmother's Story of Bunker Hill Battle etc** 
 
 7 8 9 Hawthorne's Grandfather's Chair : True Stories from New 
 
 England History. 1G20-1S03. In three parts. U 
 10 Hawtnorne's Bio-raphical Stories. With Questions** 
 11' LoS^low's Children's Hour, and Other Selections.** 
 Vi ladies in Longfellow, Wtnttier, Holmes, and Lowell. Outlines 
 
 and Topics for Study. 
 13 14 Lou-fellow's Song of Hiawatha. In two parts.? 
 i- t n r*r*\vZ tinder the Old Elm, and Other Poems.» 
 W. Bayard Taylo%L«s :a Pastoral of Norway ^and Other Poem*. 
 17, 18. Hawthc 
 19, 20. Benjam 
 
 21. Benjxmin 
 
 22, 23. Hawthc 
 
 24. Washiagto 
 
 25, 26. Lonsfe 
 27. Thoreau's 
 
 "With a Bi 
 Joha Burr 
 Hawthorn 
 Lowell's \ 
 Holmes's '. 
 Abraham ! 
 33, 34, 35. Loi 
 
 36. John Bur] 
 
 37. Charles D 
 
 38. Longfellow 
 
 40 Hawto^r^Tares^oFthe White Hills, and Sketches.** 
 
 ai Whittier's Tent on the Beach, and Associated Poems. 
 
 %' Emerson's Fortune of the Kepublic, and Other Essays, including 
 
 43' m^T^l^?^™™. From W.C.Bryakt's Translation 
 
 Edg f ewrth's 0d ^as y te Not, Want Not; and The Barring Out. 
 Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome.* 
 Old Testament Stories in Scripture Language. 
 48 Fables and Folk Stories. In two parts4 
 a 50*. Hans Andersen's Stories. In two parts.? 
 
 k\ io Washington Irving : Essays from the Sketch Book. [51. J Kip 
 5 ' V^ WinMe, and Other American Essays. [52.] The Voyage, and Other English 
 
 Essays. In two parts.* w T -r,^ T „„ 
 
 53 Scott's Lady of the Lake. Edited byW.J. Holfe. 
 notes and numerous illustrations. (Double Number, 30 cents. 
 Students' Series, cloth, to Teachers, 53 cents.) 
 Bryant's Sella, Thanatopsis, and Other Poems.* 
 Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. Thurber.* ** At * amM 
 
 Webster's First Bunker Hill Oration, and the Oration on Adam* 
 and Jefferson. 
 Also bound in linen : * 25 cents. ** 4 and 5 in one vol.. 40 cent* ; likewise 6 and 
 
 8, and 9 ; 33, 34, and 35, 
 
 28. 
 29. 
 30. 
 31. 
 32. 
 
 Chap. .__?_/_. Copyright No 
 Shell 
 
 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
 [•S.** 
 
 ?ers. 
 parts.ft 
 
 44. 
 
 45. 
 46. 
 
 47, 
 49. 
 
 54. 
 55. 
 
 56. 
 
 With copious 
 Also, in Rolfe's 
 
%tjt ^toraitie Literature Series 
 
 DEMOCRACY 
 
 AND OTHER PAPERS 
 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES KUSSELL LOWELL 
 
 WITH NOTES 
 
 2nd Copy, 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 
 Boston : 4 Park Street ; New York : 11 East Seventeenth Street 
 Chicago : 378-888 Wabash Avenue 
 
 (€fc SttoeEjsi&e pre??, Camhn&oe 
 
 if no) 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Democracy .1 
 
 On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners . . 33 
 The Study of Modern Languages ... 68 
 
 Note. Mr. Lowell's notes are distinguished from those of the 
 editor by the initials, J. R. L. 
 
 4830 
 
 Houghton, Mifflin & Co. are the only authorized publishers 
 of the works of Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Emer- 
 son. Thoreau, and Hawthorne. All editions which lack the 
 imprint or authorization of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. are issued 
 without the consent and contrary to the wishes of the authors or 
 their heirs. 
 
 Copyright, 1871 and 1886, 
 By JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 Copyright, 1891, 
 By MABEL LOWELL BURNETT. 
 
 Copyright, 1898, 
 By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 /Z-3&3 
 
 The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
 Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton and Company. 
 
iji 
 
 DEMOCRACY AND OTHER PAPERS. 
 
 DEMOCRACY. 
 
 In 1880 Mr. Lowell was appointed American Minister 
 to the Court of St. James, being transferred from Madrid, 
 where he had represented the United States for three years. 
 Before going to Spain he had held no office, and had served 
 his country publicly only as a delegate to the national con- 
 vention which nominated Hayes for the presidency, and as 
 a presidential elector. The feeling that he was essentially 
 a man of letters, and not a diplomat, was wittily expressed 
 by the London Spectator, which, on his arrival in that city, 
 announced him as " His Excellency the Ambassador of 
 American Literature to the Court of Shakespeare." But 
 although he lacked practical experience in politics and di- 
 plomacy, he had been a keen observer of public affairs, as 
 his writings had amply proved ; and his well-trained mind, 
 his sound judgment, and his unerring sagacity served him 
 in such good stead that his career abroad was perhaps a 
 surprise to many who had been inclined to regard him as a 
 dilettante in statesmanship. Rarely has our country been 
 so ably represented. 
 
 The English were not slow to perceive Mr. Lowell's 
 worth, and he was made the recipient of many honors, both 
 social and official. He was much in request as a public 
 speaker, and gave some notable addresses during his resi- 
 dence in England. The most significant of these was De- 
 mocracy, which he delivered at Birmingham on assuming 
 the presidency of the Birmingham and Midland Institute, 
 
2 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 October 6, 1884. It was felt at once, on both sides of the 
 water, to be a noble confession of political faith. In a let- 
 ter to his friend, Charles Eliot Norton, Mr. Lowell says: 
 " I send you a copy of my address at B. It has made 
 a kind of (mildish) sensation, greatly to my surprise. I 
 could n't conceive . . . that I had made so great a splash 
 with so small a pebble." 
 
 Some months after the poet's death, George William Cur- 
 tis gave an address in his honor before the Brooklyn Insti- 
 tute, from which we quote the following passage : — 
 
 " During his official residence in England, Lowell seemed 
 to have the fitting word for every occasion, and to speak it 
 with memorable distinction. . . . His discourse on demo- 
 cracy at Birmingham, in October, 1884, was not only an 
 event, but an event without a precedent. He was the min- 
 ister of the American republic to the British monarchy, and, 
 as that minister, publicly to declare in England the most 
 radical democratic principles as the ultimate logical result 
 of the British Constitution, and to do it with a temper, 
 an urbanity, a moderation, a precision of statement, and a 
 courteous grace of humor which charmed doubt into acqui- 
 escence and amazement into unfeigned admiration and ac- 
 knowledgment of a great service to political thought greatly 
 done — this was an event unknown in the annals of diplo- 
 macy, and this is what Lowell did at Birmingham. 
 
 " No American orator has made so clear and comprehen- 
 sive a declaration of the essential American principle, or so 
 simple a statement of its ethical character. Yet not a word 
 of this republican to whom Algernon Sydney would have 
 bowed, and whom Milton would have blessed, would have 
 jarred the Tory nerves of Sir Roger de Coverley, although 
 no English radical was ever more radical than he." 
 
 He must be a born leader or misleader of men, or 
 must have been sent into the world unfurnished with 
 that modulating and restraining balance-wheel which 
 
DEMOCRACY. 3 
 
 we call a sense of humor, who, in old age, has as strong 
 a confidence in his opinions and in the necessity of 
 bringing the universe into conformity with them as he 
 had in youth. In a world the very condition of whose 
 being is that it should be in perpetual flux, where all 
 seems mirage, and the one abiding thing is the effort 
 to distinguish realities from appearances, the elderly 
 man x must be indeed of a singularly tough and valid 
 fibre who is certain that he has any clarified residuum 
 of experience, any assured verdict of reflection, that 
 deserves to be called an opinion, or who, even if he 
 had, feels that he is justified in holding mankind by 
 the button while he is expounding it. And in a world 
 of daily — nay, almost hourly — journalism, where 
 every clever man, every man who thinks himself 
 clever, or whom anybody else thinks clever, is called 
 upon to deliver his judgment point-blank and at the 
 word of command on every conceivable subject of 
 human thought, or, on what sometimes seems to him 
 very much the same thing, on every inconceivable dis- 
 play of human want of thought, there is such a spend- 
 thrift waste of all those commonplaces which furnish 
 the permitted staple of public discourse that there is 
 little chance of beguiling a new tune out of the one- 
 stringed instrument on which we have been thrum- 
 ming so long. In this desperate necessity one is 
 often tempted to think that, if all the words of the 
 dictionary were tumbled down in a heap and then all 
 those fortuitous juxtapositions and combinations that 
 made tolerable sense were picked out and pieced to- 
 gether, we might find among them some poignant 
 suggestions towards novelty of thought or expression. 
 But, alas ! it is only the great poets who seem to have 
 1 Lowell was in his sixty-sixth year at this time. 
 
4 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 this unsolicited profusion of unexpected and incalcu- 
 lable phrase, this infinite variety of topic. For every- 
 body else everything has been said before, and said 
 over again after. He who has read his Aristotle will 
 be apt to think that observation has on most points 
 of general applicability said its last word, and he who 
 has mounted the tower of Plato to look abroad from 
 it will never hope to climb another with so lofty a 
 vantage of speculation. Where it is so simple if not 
 so easy a thing to hold one's peace, why add to the 
 general confusion of tongues ? There is something 
 disheartening, too, in being expected to fill up not 
 less than a certain measure of time, as if the mind 
 were an hour-glass, that need only be shaken and set 
 on one end or the other, as the case may be, to run 
 its allotted sixty minutes with decorous exactitude. I 
 recollect being once told by the late eminent natural- 
 ist, Agassiz, that when he was to deliver his first lec- 
 ture as professor (at Zurich, I believe) he had grave 
 doubts of his ability to occupy the prescribed three 
 quarters of an hour. He was speaking without notes, 
 and glancing anxiously from time to time at the 
 watch that lay before him on the desk. " When I 
 had spoken a half hour," he said, " I had told them 
 everything I knew in the world, everything! Then 
 I began to repeat myself," he added, roguishly, " and 
 I have done nothing else ever since." Beneath the 
 humorous exaggeration of the story I seemed to see 
 the face of a very serious and improving moral. And 
 yet if one were to say only what he had to say and 
 then stopped, his audience would feel defrauded of 
 their honest measure. Let us take courage by the ex- 
 ample of the French, whose exportation of Bordeaux 
 wines increases as the area of their land in vineyards 
 is diminished. 
 
DEMOCRACY. 5 
 
 To me, somewhat hopelessly revolving these things, 
 the undelayable year has rolled round, and I find my- 
 self called upon to say something in this place, where 
 so many wiser men have spoken before me. Pre- 
 cluded, in my quality of national guest, by motives of 
 taste and discretion, from dealing with any question 
 of immediate and domestic concern, it seemed to me 
 wisest, or at any rate most prudent, to choose a topic 
 of comparatively abstract interest, and to ask your 
 indulgence for a few somewhat generalized remarks 
 on a matter concerning which I had some experi- 
 mental knowledge, derived from the use of such eyes 
 and ears as Nature had been pleased to endow me 
 withal, and such report as I had been able to win 
 from them. The subject which most readily sug- 
 gested itself was the spirit and the working of those 
 conceptions of life and polity which are lumped 
 together, whether for reproach or commendation, 
 under the name of Democracy. By temperament 
 and education of a conservative turn, I saw the last 
 years of that quaint Arcadia which French travellers 
 saw with delighted amazement a century ago, and 
 have watched the change (to me a sad one) from an 
 agricultural to a proletary population. 1 The testi- 
 
 1 The participation of Frenchmen in the American Revolu- 
 tionary War naturally led to considerable intercourse between 
 the United States and France, and with the oncoming of the 
 Revolution in the latter country interest there became especially 
 keen as to the success of the new republic across the Atlantic. 
 For these and other reasons, many French travellers visited our 
 shores in the last part of the eighteenth and the first part of the 
 nineteenth centuries, and owing to the political unrest at home, 
 they were quite generally predisposed to favorable views of our 
 institutions. 
 
 Brissot de Warville, who travelled in the United States in 1788, 
 says, in the preface to the book which he published in 1791 : 
 
6 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 mony of Balaam 1 should carry some conviction. I 
 have grown to manhood and am now growing old with 
 
 the growth of this system of government in my native 
 land; have watched its advances, or what some would 
 call its encroachments, gradual and irresistible as those 
 of a glacier : have been an ear-witness to the fore- 
 bodings of wise and good and timid men. and have 
 lived to see those forebodings belied by the course of 
 events, which is apt to show itself humorously care- 
 less of the reputation of prophets. I recollect hearing 
 a sagacious old gentleman sav in 1840 that the doincr 
 away with the property qualification for suffrage twenty 
 years before had been the ruin of the State of Massa- 
 chusetts : that it had put public credit and private 
 estate alike at the mercy of demagogues. I lived to 
 see that Commonwealth twenty odd years later rjaying 
 the interest on her bonds in gold, though it cost her 
 sometimes nearly three for one to keep her faith, and 
 that while suffering an unparalleled drain of men and 
 treasure in helping to sustain the unity and self- 
 respect of the nation. 
 
 If universal suffrage has worked ill in our larger 
 cities, as it certainly has. this has been mainly because 
 the hands that wielded it were untrained to its use. 
 There the election of a majority of the trustees of the 
 
 ■• I? it not evident that private morals associate naturally with a 
 rural life ? . . . The reason why the Americans possess such 
 pure morals is because nine tenths of them live dispersed in 
 the country. ... Frenchmen ! Study the Americans of the 
 present clay. Open this book : you will here see to what degree 
 of prosperity the blessings of freedom can elevate the industry 
 of man.'' 
 
 1 That is. the testimony of one whose message is not what his 
 hearers would most gladly receive, but who speaks the truth as 
 it has been shown to him. See Numbers xxii-rsiv. 
 
DEMOCRACY. 7 
 
 public money is controlled by the most ignorant and 
 vicious of a population which has come to us from 
 abroad, wholly unpracticed in self-government and in- 
 capable of assimilation by American habits and meth- 
 ods. But the finances of our towns, where the native 
 tradition is still dominant and whose affairs are dis- 
 cussed and settled in a public assembly of the people, 
 have been in general honestly and prudently adminis- 
 tered. Even in manufacturing towns, where a major- 
 ity of the voters live by their daily wages, it is not 
 so often the recklessness as the moderation of public 
 expenditure that surprises an old-fashioned observer. 
 " The beggar is in the saddle at last," cries Proverbial 
 Wisdom. 1 " Why, in the name of all former experi- 
 ence, does n't he ride to the Devil? " Because in the 
 very act of mounting he ceased to be a beggar and 
 became pai-t owner of the piece of property he be- 
 strides. The last thing we need be anxious about is 
 property. It always has friends or the means of mak- 
 ing them. If riches have wings to fly away from their 
 owner, they have wings also to escape danger. 
 
 I hear America sometimes playfully accused of send- 
 ing you all your storms, and am in the habit of parry- 
 ing the charge by alleging that we are enabled to do 
 this because, in virtue of our protective system, we 
 can afford to make better bad weather than anybody 
 else. And what wiser use could we make of it than 
 to export it in return for the paupers which some 
 European countries are good enough to send over to 
 us who have not attained to the same skill in the man- 
 ufacture of them ? But bad weather is not the worst 
 thing that is laid at our door. A French gentleman, 
 not long ago, forgetting Burke's monition of how un- 
 1 " Beggars mounted run their horses to death.'* — Old Proverb. 
 
8 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 wise it is to draw an indictment against a whole peo- 
 ple, 1 has charged us with the responsibility of whatever 
 he finds disagreeable in the morals or manners of his 
 countrymen. If M. Zola or some other competent 
 witness would only go into the box and tell us what 
 those morals and manners were before our example 
 corrupted them ! But I confess that I find little to 
 interest and less to edify rue in these international 
 bandy ings of " You 're another." 
 
 I shall address myself to a single point only in the 
 long list of offences of which we are more or less 
 gravely accused, because that really includes all the 
 rest. It is that we are infecting the Old World with 
 what seems to be thought the entirely new disease of 
 Democracy. It is generally people who are in what 
 are called easy circumstances who can afford the lei- 
 sure to treat themselves to a handsome complaint, and 
 these experience an immediate alleviation when once 
 they have found a sonorous Greek name to abuse it 
 by. There is something consolatory also, something 
 flattering to their sense of personal dignity, and to 
 that conceit of singularity which is the natural recoil 
 from our uneasy consciousness of being commonplace, 
 in thinking ourselves victims of a malady by which 
 no one had ever suffered before. Accordingly they 
 find it simpler to class under one comprehensive head- 
 ing whatever they find offensive to their nerves, their 
 tastes, their interests, or what they suppose to be their 
 opinions, and christen it Democracy, much as physi- 
 cians label every obscure disease gout, or as cross- 
 grained fellows lay their ill-temper to the weather. 
 
 1 In his speech on moving his resolution for conciliation with 
 the American Colonies, in the House of Commons, March 22, 
 1775. See Riverside Literature Series, No. 100, p. 36. 
 
* DEMOCRACY. 9 
 
 But is it really a new ailment, and, if it be, is America 
 answerable for it? Even if she were, would it ac- 
 count for the phylloxera, and hoof-and-mouth disease, 
 and bad harvests, and bad English, and the German 
 bands, and the Boers, 1 and all the other discomforts 
 with which these later days have vexed the souls of 
 them that go in chariots ? Yet I have seen the evil 
 example of Democracy in America cited as the source 
 and origin of things quite as heterogeneous and quite 
 as little connected with it by any sequence of cause 
 and effect. Surely this ferment is nothing new. It 
 has been at work for centuries, and we are more con- 
 scious of it only because in this age of publicity, where 
 the newspapers offer a rostrum to whoever has a griev- 
 ance, or fancies that he has, the bubbles and scum 
 thrown up by it are more noticeable on the surface 
 than in those dumb ages when there was a cover of 
 silence and suppression on the cauldron. Bernardo 
 Navagero, speaking of the Provinces of Lower Austria 
 in 1546, tells us that " in them there are five sorts of 
 persons, Clergy, Barons, Nobles, Burghers, and Peas- 
 ants. Of these last no account is made, because they 
 have no voice in the Diet." 2 
 
 Nor was it among the people that subversive or 
 
 1 A reference to the unsuccessful attempt of the English in 
 1880 to reduce the Boers of the Transvaal to submission. 
 
 2 Below the Peasants, it should be remembered, was still an- 
 other even more helpless class, the servile farm-laborers. The 
 same witness informs us that of the extraordinary imposts the 
 Peasants paid nearly twice as much in proportion to their esti- 
 mated property as the Barons, Nobles, and Burghers together. 
 Moreover, the upper classes were assessed at their own valua- 
 tion, while they arbitrarily fixed that of the Peasants, who had no 
 voice. (Relazioni degli Ambasciatori Veneti, Serie I., tomo i.,pp. 
 378, 379, 389.) — J. R. R. 
 
10 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 mistaken doctrines had their rise. A Father of the 
 Church 1 said that property was theft many centuries 
 before Proudhon was born. 2 Bourdaloue reaffirmed 
 it. Montesquieu was the inventor of national work- 
 shops, and of the theory that the State owed every 
 man a living. Nay, was not the Church herself the 
 first organized Democracy ? A few centuries ago the 
 chief end of man was to keep his soul alive, and then 
 the little kernel of leaven that sets the gases at work 
 was religious, and produced the Reformation. Even 
 in that, far-sighted persons like the Emperor Charles 
 V. saw the germ of political and social revolution. 
 Now that the chief end of man seems to have become 
 the keeping of the body alive, and as comfortably 
 alive as possible, the leaven also has become wholly 
 political and social. But there had also been social 
 upheavals before the Reformation and contemporane- 
 ously with it, especially among men of Teutonic race. 
 The Reformation gave outlet and direction to an un- 
 rest already existing. Formerly the immense majority 
 of men — our brothers — knew only their sufferings, 
 their wants, and their desires. They are beginning 
 now to know their opportunity and their power. All 
 persons who see deeper than their plates are rather 
 inclined to thank God for it than to bewail it, for the 
 
 1 St. Ambrose said : " For nature has given all things to all 
 men in common ; for God has ordained that all things shall be 
 so produced that food shall be common to all, and the earth as 
 it were the common possession of all. Nature therefore is the 
 mother of common right, usurpation of private." 
 
 2 Pierre Joseph Proudhon, a French publicist and a specu- 
 lator on social and political subjects, published in 1840 his first 
 book, " Qu'est-ce que la Proprie'te' ? " And his own answer was, 
 " La proprie'te' c'est le vol." (What is property ? Property is 
 theft.) 
 
DEMOCRACY. 11 
 
 sores of Lazarus have a poison in them against which 
 Dives has no antidote. 
 
 There can be no doubt that the spectacle of a great 
 and prosperous Democracy on the other side of the 
 Atlantic must react powerfully on the aspirations and 
 political theories of men in the Old World who do 
 not find things to their mind ; but, whether for good 
 or evil, it should not be overlooked that the acorn . 
 from which it sprang was ripened on the British oak. 
 Every successive swarm that has gone out from this 
 officina gentium 1 has, when left to its own instincts — 
 may I not call them hereditary instincts ? — assumed 
 a more or less thoroughly democratic form. This 
 would seem to show, what I believe to be the fact, that 
 the British Constitution, under whatever disguises of 
 prudence or decorum, is essentially democratic. Eng- 
 land, indeed, may be called a monarchy with demo- 
 cratic tendencies, the United States a democracy with 
 conservative instincts. People are continually saying 
 that America is in the air, and I am glad to think it 
 is, since this means only that a clearer conception of 
 human claims and human duties is beginning to be 
 prevalent. The discontent with the existing order of 
 things, however, pervaded the atmosphere wherever 
 the conditions were favorable, long before Columbus, 
 seeking the back door of Asia, found himself knock- 
 ing at the front door of America. I say wherever the 
 conditions were favorable, for it is certain that the 
 germs of disease do not stick or find a prosperous 
 field for their development and noxious activity unless 
 where the simplest sanitary precautions have been 
 neglected. " For this effect defective comes by cause," 
 as Polonius said long ago. 2 It is only by instigation 
 1 Workshop of the world. 2 See Hamlet, Act II. Scene 2. 
 
12 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 of the wrongs of men that what are called the Rights 
 of Man become turbulent and dangerous. It is then 
 only that they syllogize unwelcome truths. It is not 
 the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but 
 the revolts of intelligence : — 
 
 " The wicked and the weak rebel in vain, 
 Slaves by their own compulsion." 
 
 Had the governing classes in France during the last 
 century paid as much heed to their proper business 
 as to their pleasures or manners, the guillotine need 
 never have severed that spinal marrow of orderly and 
 secular tradition through which in a normally consti- 
 tuted state the brain sympathizes with the extremities 
 and sends will and impulsion thither. It is only when 
 the reasonable and practicable are denied that men 
 demand the unreasonable and impracticable ; only 
 when the possible is made difficult that they fancy 
 the impossible to be easy. Fairy tales are made out 
 of the dreams of the poor. No ; the sentiment which 
 lies at the root of democracy is nothing new. I am 
 speaking always of a sentiment, a spirit, and not of a 
 form of government ; for this was but the outgrowth 
 of the other and not its cause. This sentiment is 
 merely an expression of the natural wish of people 
 to have a hand, if need be a controlling hand, in the 
 management of their own affairs. What is new is 
 that they are more and more gaining that control, 
 and learning more and more how to be worthy of it. 
 What we used to call the tendency or drift — what 
 we are being taught to call more wisely the evolution 
 of things — has for some time been setting steadily in 
 this direction. There is no good in arguing with the 
 inevitable. The only argument available with an east 
 wind is to put on your overcoat. And in this case, 
 
DEMOCRACY. 13 
 
 also, the prudent will prepare themselves to encounter 
 what they cannot prevent. Some people advise us to 
 put on the brakes, as if the movement of which we 
 are conscious were that of a railway train running 
 down an incline. But a metaphor is no argument, 
 though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one 
 home and imbed it in the memory. Our disquiet 
 comes of what nurses and other experienced persons 
 call growing-pains, and need not seriously alarm us. 
 They are what every generation before us — certainly 
 every generation since the invention of printing — has 
 gone through with more or less good fortune. To the 
 door of every generation there comes a knocking, and 
 unless the household, like the Thane of Cawdor 1 and 
 his wife, have been doing some deed without a name, 
 they need not shudder. It turns out at worst to be a 
 poor relation who wishes to come in out of the cold. 
 The porter always grumbles and is slow to open. 
 " Who 's there, in the name of Beelzebub ? " he mut- 
 ters. Not a change for the better in our human house- 
 keeping has ever taken place that wise and good men 
 have not opposed it, — have not prophesied with the 
 alderman that the world would wake up to find its 
 throat cut in consequence of it. The world, on the 
 contrary, wakes up, rubs its eyes, yawns, stretches 
 itself, and goes about its business as if nothing had 
 happened. Suppression of the slave trade, abolition 
 of slavery, trade unions, — at all of these excellent 
 people shook their heads despondingly, and murmured 
 " Ichabod." 2 But the trade unions are now debat- 
 ing instead of conspiring, and we all read their dis- 
 
 1 See Macbeth, Act II., Scene 2. 
 
 2 " And she named the child Ichabod, saying, * The glory is 
 departed from Israel.' " 1 Sam. iv. 21. 
 
14 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 cussions with comfort and hope, sure that they are 
 learning the business of citizenship and the difficulties 
 of practical legislation. 
 
 One of the most curious of these frenzies of exclu- 
 sioD was that against the emancipation of the Jews. 
 All share in the government of the world was denied 
 for centuries to perhaps the ablest, certainly the most 
 tenacious, race that had ever lived in it — the race to 
 whom we owed our religion and the purest spiritual 
 stimulus and consolation to be found in all literature 
 — a race in which ability seems as natural and hered- 
 itary as the curve of their noses, and whose blood, 
 furtively mingling with the bluest bloods in Europe, 
 has quickened them with its own indomitable impul- 
 sion. We drove them into a corner, but they had 
 their revenge, as the wronged are always sure to have 
 it sooner or later. They made their corner the coun- 
 ter and banking-house of the world, and thence they 
 rule it and us with the ignobler sceptre of finance. 
 Your grandfathers mobbed Priestley l only that you 
 
 1 Rev. Dr. Joseph Priestley, an English Dissenting minister 
 who was also a scientist of repute, noted as the discoverer of 
 oxygen. At the time of the French Revolution he was settled 
 in Birmingham, where he became so unpopular on account of his 
 theological and political doctrines that his church and dwelling- 
 house were destroyed by a mob. He tells the story with much 
 calmness in his Memoirs : — 
 
 " On occasion of the celebration of the French Revolution on 
 July 14, 1791, by several of my friends, but with which I had 
 little to do, a mob, encouraged by some persons in power, first 
 burned the meeting-house in which I preached, then another 
 meeting-house in the town, and then my dwelling-house, demol- 
 ishing my library, apparatus, and, as far as they could, every- 
 thing belonging to me. They also burned, or much damaged, 
 the houses of many Dissenters, chiefly my friends. . . . Being 
 in some personal danger on this occasion, I went to London ; 
 
DEMOCRACY. 15 
 
 might set up his statue and make Birmingham the 
 headquarters of English Unitarianism. We hear it 
 said sometimes that this is an age of transition, as if 
 that made matters clearer ; but can any one point us 
 to an age that was not? If he could, he would show 
 us an age of stagnation. The question for us, as it 
 has been for all before us, is to make the transition 
 gradual and easy, to see that our points are right so 
 that the train may not come to grief. For we should 
 remember that nothing is more natural for people 
 whose education has been neglected than to spell evo- 
 lution with an initial " r." A great man struggling 
 with the storms of fate has been called a sublime 
 spectacle ; but surely a great man wrestling with these 
 new forces that have come into the world, mastering 
 them and controlling them to beneficent ends, would 
 be a yet sublimer. Here is not a danger, and if there 
 were it would be only a better school of manhood, a 
 nobler scope for ambition. I have hinted that what 
 people are afraid of in democracy is less the thing 
 itself than what they conceive to be its necessary ad- 
 juncts and consequences. It is supposed to reduce 
 all mankind to a dead level of mediocrity in charac- 
 ter and culture, to vulgarize men's conceptions of life, 
 and therefore their code of morals, manners, and con- 
 duct — to endanger the rights of property and pos- 
 session. But I believe that the real gravamen of the 
 charges lies in the habit it has of making itself gener- 
 ally disagreeable by asking the Powers that Be at 
 the most inconvenient moment whether they are the 
 
 and so violent was the spirit of party which then prevailed that 
 I believe I could hardly have been safe in any other place." 
 
 Dr. Priestley spent the last years of his life in the United 
 States, at Northumberland, Pa., on the Susquehanna River. 
 
16 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 powers that ought to be. If the powers that be are 
 in a condition to give a satisfactory answer to this in- 
 evitable question, they need feel in no way discomfited 
 by it. 
 
 Few people take the trouble of trying to find out 
 what democracy really is. Yet this would be a great 
 help, for it is our lawless and uncertain thoughts, it 
 is the indefiniteness of our impressions, that fill dark- 
 ness, whether mental or physical, with spectres aud 
 hobgoblins. Democracy is nothing more than an ex- 
 periment in government, more likely to succeed in a 
 new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must 
 stand or fall on its own merits as others have done 
 before it. For there is no trick of perpetual motion 
 in politics any more than in mechanics. President 
 Lincoln defined democracy to be " the government of 
 the people by the people for the people." This is a 
 sufficiently compact statement of it as a political ar- 
 rangement. Theodore Parker said that " Democracy 
 meant not ' I 'm as good as you are,' but ' You 're as 
 good as I am.' ' ! And this is the ethical conception 
 of it, necessary as a complement of the other ; a con- 
 ception which, could it be made actual and practical, 
 would easily solve all the riddles that the old sphinx 
 of political and social economy who sits by the road- 
 side has been proposing to mankind from the begin- 
 ning, and which mankind have shown such a singular 
 talent for answering wrongly. In this sense Christ 
 was the first true democrat that ever breathed, as 
 the old dramatist Dekker said he was the first true 
 gentleman. The characters may be easily doubled, 
 so strong is the likeness between them. A beautiful 
 and profound parable of the Persian poet Jellaladeen 1 
 
 1 Jelal-ed-din, Mohammed er-Riimi, a famous Persian poet of 
 
DEMOCRACY. 17 
 
 tells us that " One knocked at the Beloved's door, and 
 a voice asked from within ' Who is there ? ' and he 
 answered 4 It is I.' Then the voice said, ' This house 
 will not hold me and thee ; ' and the door was not 
 opened. Then went the lover into the desert and 
 fasted and prayed in solitude, and after a year he re- 
 turned and knocked again at the door ; and again the 
 voice asked 4 Who is there ? ' and he said ■ It is thy- 
 self ; ' and the door was opened to him." But that is 
 idealism, you will say, and this is an only too practi- 
 cal world. I grant it ; but I am one of those who 
 believe that the real will never find an irremovable 
 basis till it rests on the ideal. It used to be thought 
 that a democracy was possible only in a small terri- 
 tory, and this is doubtless true of a democracy strictly 
 denned, for in such all the citizens decide directly 
 upon every question of public concern in a general 
 assembly. An example still survives in the tiny Swiss 
 canton of Appenzell. But this immediate interven- 
 tion of the people in their own affairs is not of the 
 essence of democracy ; it is not necessary, nor indeed, 
 in most cases, practicable. Democracies to which Mr. 
 Lincoln's definition would fairly enough apply have 
 existed, and now exist, in which, though the supreme 
 authority reside in the people, yet they can act only 
 indirectly on the national policy. This generation has 
 seen a democracy with an imperial figurehead, and in 
 all that have ever existed the body politic has never 
 embraced all the inhabitants included within its terri- 
 tory : the right to share in the direction of affairs has 
 been confined to citizens, and citizenship has been 
 further restricted by various limitations, sometimes of 
 
 the thirteenth century, who was at the head of a college of mys- 
 tic theology. 
 
18 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 property, sometimes of nativity, and always of age and 
 sex. 
 
 The framers of the American Constitution were far 
 from wishing or intending to found a democracy in 
 the strict sense of the word, though, as was inevitable, 
 every expansion of the scheme of government they 
 elaborated has been in a democratical direction. But 
 this has been generally the slow result of growth, and 
 not the sudden innovation of theory ; in fact, they had 
 a profound disbelief in theory, and knew better than 
 to commit the folly of breaking with the past. They 
 were not seduced by the French fallacy that a new 
 system of government could be ordered like a new suit 
 of clothes. 1 They would as soon have thought of or- 
 dering a new suit of flesh and skin. It is only on the 
 roaring loom of time that the stuff is woven for such 
 a vesture of their thought and experience as they were 
 meditating. They recognized fully the value of tra- 
 dition and habit as the great allies of permanence and 
 stability. They all had that distaste for innovation 
 which belonged to their race, and many of them a 
 distrust of human nature derived from their creed. 
 The day of sentiment was over, and no dithyrambic 
 affirmations or fine-drawn analyses of the Rights of 
 Man would serve their present turn. This was a 
 practical question, and they addressed themselves to 
 it as men of knowledge and judgment should. Their 
 problem was how to adapt English principles and 
 precedents to the new conditions of American life, 
 and they solved it with singular discretion. They put 
 as many obstacles as they could contrive, not in the 
 
 1 No other nation of importance has ever made such frequent 
 changes in its form of government as has France since the first 
 Revolution. 
 
DEMOCRACY. 19 
 
 way of the people's will, but of their whim. With 
 few exceptions they probably admitted the logic of 
 the then accepted syllogism, — democracy, anarchy, 
 despotism. But this formula was framed upon the 
 experience of small cities shut up to stew within their 
 narrow walls, where the number of citizens made but 
 an inconsiderable fraction of the inhabitants, where 
 every passion was reverberated from house to house 
 and from man to man with gathering rumor till every 
 impulse became gregarious and therefore inconsider- 
 ate, and every popular assembly needed but an infu- 
 sion of eloquent sophistry to turn it into a mob, all 
 the more dangerous because sanctified with the for- 
 mality of law. 1 
 
 Fortunately their case was wholly different. They 
 were to legislate for a widely scattered population and 
 for States already practised in the discipline of a par- 
 tial independence. They had an unequalled oppor- 
 tunity and enormous advantages. The material they 
 had to work upon was already democratical by instinct 
 and habitude. It was tempered to their hands by 
 more than a century's schooling in self-government, 
 They had but to give permanent and conservative 
 form to a ductile mass. In giving impulse and direc- 
 tion to their new institutions, especially in supply- 
 ing them with checks and balances, they had a great 
 help and safeguard in their federal organization. The 
 different, sometimes conflicting, interests and social 
 systems of the several States made existence as a 
 Union and coalescence into a nation conditional on 
 
 1 The effect of the electric telegraph in reproducing this troop- 
 ing of emotion and perhaps of opinion is yet to be measured. The 
 effect of Darwinism as a disintegrator of humanitarianism is also 
 to be reckoned with. — J. R. L. 
 
20 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 a constant practice of moderation and compromise. 
 The very elements of disintegration were the best 
 guides in political training. Their children learned 
 the lesson of compromise only too well, and it was the 
 application of it to a question of fundamental morals 
 that cost us our civil war. We learned once for all 
 that compromise makes a good umbrella but a poor 
 roof ; that it is a temporary expedient, often wise in 
 party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesman- 
 ship. 
 
 Has not the trial of democracy in America proved, 
 on the whole, successful ? If it had not, would the 
 Old World be vexed with any fears of its proving 
 contagious ? This trial would have been less severe 
 could it have been made with a people homogeneous 
 in race, language, and traditions, whereas the United 
 States have been called on to absorb and assimilate 
 enormous masses of foreign population, heterogeneous 
 in all these respects, and drawn mainly from that class 
 which might fairly say that the world was not their 
 friend, nor the world's law. The previous condition 
 too often justified the traditional Irishman, who, land- 
 ing in New York and asked what his politics were, in- 
 quired if there was a Government there, and on being 
 told that there was, retorted, " Thin I 'm agin it ! " 
 We have taken from Europe the poorest, the most 
 ignorant, the most turbulent of her people, and have 
 made them over into good citizens, who have added to 
 our wealth, and who are ready to die in defence of 
 a country and of institutions which they know to be 
 worth dying for. The exceptions have been (and 
 they are lamentable exceptions) where these hordes 
 of ignorance and poverty have coagulated in great 
 cities. But the social system is yet to seek which has 
 
DEMOCRACY. 21 
 
 not to look the same terrible wolf in the eyes. On 
 the other hand, at this very moment Irish peasants 
 are buying up the worn-out farms of Massachusetts, 
 and making them productive again by the same virtues 
 of industry and thrift that once made them profitable 
 to the English ancestors of the men who are deserting 
 them. To have achieved even these prosaic results 
 (if you choose to call them so), and that out of mate- 
 rials the most discordant, — I might say the most re- 
 calcitrant, — argues a certain beneficent virtue in the 
 system that could do it, and is not to be accounted for 
 by mere luck. Carlyle said scornfully that America 
 meant only roast turkey every day for everybody. 
 He forgot that States, as Bacon said of wars, go on 
 their bellies. As for the security of property, it should 
 be tolerably well secured in a country where every 
 other man hopes to be rich, even though the only pro- 
 perty qualification be the ownership of two hands that 
 add to the general wealth. Is it not the best security 
 for anything to interest the largest possible number 
 of persons in its preservation and the smallest in its 
 division ? In point of fact, far-seeing men count the 
 increasing power of wealth and its combinations as 
 one of the chief dangers with which the institutions 
 of the United States are threatened in the not distant 
 future. The right of individual property is no doubt 
 the very corner-stone of civilization as hitherto under- 
 stood, but I am a little impatient of being told that 
 property is entitled to exceptional consideration be- 
 cause it bears all burdens of the State. It bears those, 
 indeed, which can most easily be borne, but poverty 
 pays with its person the chief expenses of war, pesti- 
 lence, and famine. Wealth should not forget this, 
 for poverty is beginning to think of it now and then. 
 
22 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 Let me not be misunderstood. I see as clearly as any 
 man possibly can, and rate as highly, the value of 
 wealth, and of hereditary wealth, as the security of re- 
 finement, the feeder of all those arts that ennoble and 
 beautify life, and as making a country worth living 
 in. Many an ancestral hall here in England has been 
 a nursery of that culture which has been of example 
 and benefit to all. Old gold has a civilizing virtue 
 which new gold must grow old to be capable of secret- 
 ing. 
 
 I should not think of coming before you to defend 
 or to criticise any form of government. All have 
 their virtues, all their defects, and all have illustrated 
 one period or another in the history of the race, with 
 signal services to humanity and culture. There is not 
 one that could stand a cynical cross-examination by 
 an experienced criminal lawyer, except that of a per- 
 fectly wise and perfectly good despot, such as the 
 world has never seen, except in that white-haired king 
 of Browning's, who 
 
 " Lived long ago 
 In the morning- of the world, 
 When Earth was nearer Heaven than now." 1 
 
 The English race, if they did not invent government 
 by discussion, have at least carried it nearest to per- 
 fection in practice. It seems a very safe and reason- 
 able contrivance for occupying the attention of the 
 country, and is certainly a better way of settling ques- 
 tions than by push of pike. Yet, if one should ask 
 it why it should not rather be called government by 
 gabble, it would have to fumble in its pocket a good 
 while before it found the change for a convincing 
 
 1 See Browning's Pippa Passes. These lines occur in one of 
 Pippa's songs. 
 
DEMOCRACY. 23 
 
 reply. As matters stand, too, it is beginning to be 
 doubtful whether Parliament and Congress sit at 
 Westminster and Washington or in the editors' rooms 
 of the leading journals, so thoroughly is everything 
 debated before the authorized and responsible debat- 
 ers get on their legs. And what shall we say of gov- 
 ernment by a majority of voices ? To a person who 
 in the last century would have called himself an Im- 
 partial Observer, a numerical preponderance seems, 
 on the whole, as clumsy a way of arriving at truth as 
 could well be devised, but experience has apparently 
 shown it to be a convenient arrangement for deter- 
 mining what may be expedient or advisable or practi- 
 cable at any given moment. Truth, after all, wears a 
 different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious 
 to wait till all were agreed. She is said to lie at the 
 bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that 
 whoever looks down in search of her sees his own 
 image at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that 
 he has seen the goddess, but that she is far better- 
 looking than he had imagined. 
 
 The arguments against universal suffrage are equally 
 unanswerable. " What," we exclaim, " shall Tom, 
 Dick, and Harry have as much weight in the scale as 
 I ? " Of course, nothing could be more absurd. And 
 yet universal suffrage has not been the instrument of 
 greater unwisdom than contrivances of a more select 
 description. Assemblies could be mentioned composed 
 entirely of Masters of Arts and Doctors in Divinity 
 which have sometimes shown traces of human passion 
 or prejudice in their votes. Have the Serene High- 
 nesses and Enlightened Classes carried on the busi- 
 ness of Mankind so well, then, that there is no use in 
 trying a less costly method ? The democratic theory 
 
24 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 is that those Constitutions are likely to prove steadi- 
 est which have the broadest base, that the right to 
 vote makes a safety-valve of every voter, and that the 
 best way of teaching a man how to vote is to give him 
 the chance of practice. For the question is no longer 
 the academic one, " Is it wise to give every man the 
 ballot ? " but rather the practical one, " Is it prudent 
 to deprive whole classes of it any longer ? " It may 
 be conjectured that it is cheaper in the long run to 
 lift men up than to hold them down, and that the 
 ballot in their hands is less dangerous to society than 
 a sense of wrong in their heads. At any rate this is 
 the dilemma to which the drift of opinion has been 
 for some time sweeping us, and in politics a dilemma 
 is a more unmanageable thing to hold by the horns 
 than a wolf by the ears. It is said that the right of 
 suffrage is not valued when it is indiscriminately be- 
 stowed, and there may be some truth in this, for I 
 have observed that what men prize most is a privi- 
 lege, even if it be that of chief mourner at a funeral. 
 But is there not danger that it will be valued at more 
 than its worth if denied, and that some illegitimate 
 way will be sought to make up for the want of it? 
 Men who have a voice in public affairs are at once 
 affiliated with one or other of the great parties be- 
 tween which society is divided, merge their individual 
 hopes and opinions in its safer, because more general- 
 ized, hopes and opinions, are disciplined by its tactics, 
 and acquire, to a certain degree, the orderly qualities 
 of an army. They no longer belong to a class, but to 
 a body corporate. Of one thing, at least, we may be 
 certain, that, under whatever method of helping things 
 to go wrong man's wit can contrive, those who have 
 the divine right to govern will be found to govern in 
 
DEMOCRACY. 25 
 
 the end, and that the highest privilege to which the 
 majority of mankind can aspire is that of being gov- 
 erned by those wiser than they. Universal suffrage 
 has in the United States sometimes been made the 
 instrument of inconsiderate changes, under the notion 
 of reform, and this from a misconception of the true 
 meaning of popular government. One of these has 
 been the substitution in many of the States of popular 
 election for official selection in the choice of judges. 
 The same system applied to military officers was the 
 source of much evil during our civil war, and, I be- 
 lieve, had to be abandoned. But it has been also 
 true that on all great questions of national policy a 
 reserve of prudence and discretion has been brought 
 out at the critical moment to turn the scale in favor 
 of a wiser decision. An appeal to the reason of the 
 people has never been known to fail in the long run. 
 It is, perhaps, true that, by effacing the principle of 
 passive obedience, democracy, ill understood, has slack- 
 ened the spring of that ductility to discipline which 
 is essential to " the unity and married calm of States." 
 But I feel assured that experience and necessity will 
 cure this evil, as they have shown their power to cure 
 others. And under what frame of policy have evils 
 ever been remedied till they became intolerable, and 
 shook men out of their indolent indifference through 
 their fears ? 
 
 We are told that the inevitable result of democracy 
 is to sap the foundations of personal independence, to 
 weaken the principle of authority, to lessen the respect 
 due to eminence, whether in station, virtue, or genius. 
 If these things were so, society could not hold to- 
 gether. Perhaps the best foreing-Jiouse of robust indi- 
 viduality would be where public opinion is inclined to 
 
26 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 be most overbearing, as lie must be of heroic temper 
 who should walk along Piccadilly at the height of the 
 season in a soft hat. As for authority, it is one of 
 the symptoms of the time that the religious reverence 
 for it is declining everywhere, but this is due partly 
 to the fact that state-craft is no longer looked upon 
 as a mystery, but as a business, and partly to the decay 
 of superstition, by which I mean the habit of respect- 
 ing what we are told to respect rather than what is 
 respectable in itself. There is more rough and tum- 
 ble in the American democracy than is altogether 
 agreeable to people of sensitive nerves and refined 
 habits, and the people take their political duties 
 lightly and laughingly, as is, perhaps, neither unnatu- 
 ral nor unbecoming in a young giant. Democracies 
 can no more jump away from their own shadows than 
 the rest of us can. They no doubt sometimes make 
 mistakes and pay honor to men who do not deserve it. 
 But they do this because they believe them worthy of 
 it, and though it be true that the idol is the measure 
 of the worshipper, yet the worship has in it the germ 
 of a nobler religion. But is it democracies alone that 
 fall into these errors ? I, who have seen it proposed 
 to erect a statue to Hudson, the railway king, 1 and 
 have heard Louis Napoleon hailed as the saviour of 
 society by men who certainly had no democratic asso- 
 ciations or leanings, am not ready to think so. But 
 democracies have likewise their finer instincts. I have 
 
 1 George Hudson, an English railway director and speculator, 
 who was for a time immensely successful in his schemes. At 
 the height of his prosperity a statue to him was proposed, and 
 £25,000 were subscribed for it. But before the money could be 
 collected he had been exposed as dishonorable in his business 
 affairs, and his fall was more rapid than his rise. 
 
DEMOCRACY. 27 
 
 also seen the wisest statesman and most pregnant 
 speaker of onr generation, a man of humble birth and 
 ungainly manners, of little culture beyond what his 
 own genius supplied, become more absolute in power 
 than any monarch of modern times through the rever- 
 ence of his countrymen for his honesty, his wisdom, 
 his sincerity, his faith in God and man, and the nobly 
 humane simplicity of his character. And I remem- 
 ber another whom popular respect enveloped as with 
 a halo, the least vulgar of men, the most austerely 
 genial, and the most independent of opinion. Wher- 
 ever he went he never met a stranger, but everywhere 
 neighbors and friends proud of him as their ornament 
 and decoration. Institutions which could bear and 
 breed such men as Lincoln and Emerson had surely 
 some energy for good. No, amid all the fruitless 
 turmoil and miscarriage of the world, if there be one 
 thing steadfast and of favorable omen, one thing to 
 make optimism distrust its own obscure distrust, it is 
 the rooted instinct in men to admire what is better 
 and more beautiful than themselves. The touchstone 
 of political and social institutions is their ability to 
 supply them with worthy objects of this sentiment, 
 which is the very tap-root of civilization and progress. 
 There would seem to be no readier way of feeding it 
 with the elements of growth and vigor than such an 
 organization of society as will enable men to respect 
 themselves, and so to justify them in respecting others. 
 Such a result is quite possible under other condi- 
 tions than those of an avowedly democratical Consti- 
 tution. For I take it that the real essence of demo- 
 cracy was fairly enough defined by the First Napoleon 
 when he said that the French Revolution meant " la 
 carriere ouverte aux talents " — a clear pathway for 
 
28 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 merit of whatever kind. I should be inclined to para- 
 phrase this by calling democracy that form of society, 
 no matter what its political classification, in which 
 every man had a chance and knew that he had it. If 
 a man can climb, and feels himself encouraged to 
 climb, from a coalpit to the highest position for which 
 he is fitted, he can well afford to be indifferent what 
 name is given to the government under which he lives. 
 The Bailli 1 of Mirabeau, uncle of the more famous 
 tribune of that name, wrote in 1771 : " The English 
 are, in my opinion, a hundred times more agitated 
 and more unfortunate than the very Algerines them- 
 selves, because they do not know and will not know 
 till the destruction of their over-swollen power, which 
 I believe very near, whether they are monarchy, aris- 
 tocracy, or democracy, and wish to play the part of 
 all three." England has not been obliging enough to 
 fulfil the Bailli's prophecy, and perhaps it was this 
 very carelessness about the name, and concern about 
 the substance of popular government, this skill in get- 
 ting the best out of things as they are, in utilizing all 
 the motives which influence men, and in giving one 
 direction to many impulses, that has been a principal 
 factor of her greatness and power. Perhaps it is for- 
 tunate to have an unwritten Constitution, for men are 
 prone to be tinkering the work of their own hands, 
 whereas they are more willing to let time and circum- 
 stance mend or modify what time and circumstance 
 have made. All free governments, whatever their 
 name, are in reality governments by public opinion, 
 and it is on the quality of this public opinion that 
 
 1 Jean Antoine Mirabeau, Bailli, or Bailiff. The founder of 
 the family of Mirabeau was Honore* Riquete, who bought the 
 estate of Mirabeau, whence the name. 
 
DEMOCRACY. 29 
 
 their prosperity depends. It is, therefore, their first 
 duty to purify the element from which they draw the 
 breath of life. With the growth of democracy grows 
 also the fear, if not the danger, that this atmosphere 
 may be corrupted with poisonous exhalations from 
 lower and more malarious levels, and the question of 
 sanitation becomes more instant and pressing. De- 
 mocracy in its best sense is merely the letting in of 
 light and air. Lord Sherbrooke, with his usual epi- 
 grammatic terseness, bids you educate your future 
 rulers. 1 But would this alone be a sufficient safe- 
 guard? To educate the intelligence is to enlarge the 
 horizon of its desires and wants. And it is well that 
 this should be so. But the enterprise must go deeper 
 and prepare the way for satisfying those desires and 
 wants in so far as they are legitimate. What is really 
 ominous of danger to the existing order of things is 
 not democracy (which, properly understood, is a con- 
 servative force), but the Socialism which may find a 
 fulcrum in it. If we cannot equalize conditions and 
 fortunes any more than we can equalize the brains 
 of men — and a very sagacious person has said that 
 " where two men ride of a horse one must ride be- 
 
 1 Kobert Lowe, Viscount Sherbrooke, (1811-1892). An Eng- 
 lish politician who opposed the movements for the extension of 
 suffrage. In an address on education, delivered in 1867, he 
 said : — 
 
 " We are all aware that the Government of the country, the 
 voice potential in the Government, is placed in the hands of per- 
 sons in a lower position of life than has hitherto been the case. 
 ... I am most anxious to educate the lower classes of this coun- 
 try, in order to qualify them for the power that has passed, and 
 perhaps will pass in a still greater degree, into their hands. . . . 
 The lower classes ought to be educated to discharge the duties 
 cast upon them." 
 
30 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 hind " — we can yet, perhaps, do something to correct 
 those methods and influences that lead to enormous 
 inequalities, and to prevent their growing more enor- 
 mous. It is all very well to pooh-pooh Mr. George 1 
 and to prove him mistaken in his political economy. 
 I do not believe that land should be divided because 
 the quantity of it is limited by nature. Of what may 
 this not be said ? A fortiori, we might on the same 
 principle insist on a division of human wit, for I have 
 observed that the quantity of this has been even more 
 inconveniently limited. Mr. George himself has an 
 inequitably large share of it. But he is right in his 
 impelling motive ; right, also, I am convinced, in in- 
 sisting that humanity makes a part, by far the most 
 important part, of political economy ; and in thinking 
 man to be of more concern and more convincing 
 than the longest columns of figures in the world. For 
 unless you include human nature in your addition, 
 your total is sure to be wrong and your deductions 
 from it fallacious. Communism means barbarism, but 
 Socialism means, or wishes to mean, cooperation and 
 community of interests, sympathy, the giving to the 
 hands not so large a share as to the brains, but a 
 larger share than hitherto in the wealth they must 
 combine to produce — means, in short, the practical 
 application of Christianity to life, and has in it the 
 secret of an orderly and benign reconstruction. State 
 Socialism would cut off the very roots in personal 
 character — self - help, forethought, and frugality — 
 which nourish and sustain the trunk and branches of 
 every vigorous Commonwealth. 
 
 I do not believe in violent changes, nor do I expect 
 them. Things in possession have a very firm grip. 
 1 Henry George (1839-1897), author of Progress and Poverty. 
 
DEMOCRACY. 31 
 
 One of the strongest cements of society is the convic- 
 tion of mankind that the state of things into which 
 they are born is a part of the order of the universe, 
 as natural, let us say, as that the sun should go round 
 the earth. It is a conviction that they will not sur- 
 render except on compulsion, and a wise society should 
 look to it that this compulsion be not put upon them. 
 For the individual man there is no radical cure, out- 
 side of human nature itself, for the evils to which 
 human nature is heir. The rule will always hold good 
 that you must 
 
 " Be your own palace or the world 's your gaol." 
 
 But for artificial evils, for evils that spring from want 
 of thought, thought must find a remedy somewhere. 
 There has been no period of time in which wealth has 
 been more sensible of its duties than now. It builds 
 hospitals, it establishes missions among the poor, it 
 endows schools. It is one of the advantages of ac- 
 cumulated wealth, and of the leisure it renders possi- 
 ble, that people have time to think of the wants and 
 sorrows of their fellows. But all these remedies are 
 partial and palliative merely. It is as if we should 
 apply plasters to a single pustule of the small -pox 
 with a view of driving out the disease. The true way 
 is to discover and to extirpate the germs. As society 
 is now constituted these are in the air it breathes, in 
 the water it drinks, in things that seem, and which 
 it has always believed, to be the most innocent and 
 healthful. The evil elements it neglects corrupt these 
 in their springs and pollute them in their courses. 
 Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that 
 the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never 
 come. The world has outlived much, and will outlive 
 a great deal more, and men have contrived to be happy 
 
32 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 in it. It has shown the strength of its constitution in 
 nothing more than in surviving the quack medicines 
 it has tried. In the scales of the destinies brawn will 
 never weigh so much as brain. Our healing is not in 
 the storm or in the whirlwind, it is not in monarchies, 
 or aristocracies, or democracies, but will be revealed 
 by the still small voice that speaks to the conscience 
 and the heart, prompting us to a wider and wiser hu- 
 manity. 
 
ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN 
 FOREIGNERS. 1 
 
 Walking one. day toward the Village, 2 as we used 
 to call it in the good old days, when almost every 
 dweller in the town had been born in it, I was enjoy- 
 ing that delicious sense of disenthralment from the 
 actual which the deepening twilight brings with it, 
 giving as it does a sort of obscure novelty to things 
 familiar. The coolness, the hush, broken only by the 
 distant bleat of some belated goat, querulous to be 
 disburthened of her milky load, the few faint stars, 
 more guessed as yet than seen, the sense that the com- 
 ing dark would so soon fold me in the secure privacy 
 of its disguise, — all things combined in a result as 
 near absolute peace as can be hoped for by a man who 
 knows that there is a writ out against him in the 
 hands of the printer's devil. For the moment, I was 
 enjoying the blessed privilege of thinking without 
 being called on to stand and deliver what I thought 
 to the small public who are good enough to take any 
 interest therein. I love old ways, and the path I was 
 walking felt kindly to the feet it had known for al- 
 
 1 " A specimen of pure irony, keen as a Damascus blade, and 
 finished to the utmost. It is doubtful if there is another essay 
 in modern English superior in power, wit, and adroitness." — 
 F. H. Underwood. 
 
 2 Elmwood is situated more than a mile from Harvard Square 
 in Cambridge, on the way toward Watertown. In the earlier 
 part of Lowell's life it was quite in the country, and one might 
 naturally speak of walking to the " Village " of Cambridge. 
 
34 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 most fifty years. How many fleeting impressions it 
 had shared with me ! How many times I had lingered 
 to study the shadows of the leaves mezzotinted upon 
 the turf that edged it by the moon, of the bare boughs 
 etched with a touch beyond Rembrandt by the same 
 unconscious artist on the smooth page of snow ! If 
 I turned round, through dusky tree -gaps came the 
 first twinkle of evening lamps in the dear old home- 
 stead. On Corey's hill I could see these tiny pharoses 
 of love and home and sweet domestic thoughts flash 
 out one by one across the blackening salt-meadow be- 
 tween. How much has not kerosene added to the 
 cheerfulness of our evening landscape ! A pair of 
 night-herons flapped heavily over me toward the hid- 
 den river. The war was ended. I might walk town- 
 ward without that aching dread of bulletins that had 
 darkened the July sunshine and twice made the scar- 
 let leaves of October seem stained with blood. I re- 
 membered with a pang, half-proud, half-painful, how, 
 so many years ago, I had walked over the same path 
 and felt round my finger the soft pressure of a little 
 hand that was one day to harden with faithful grip of 
 sabre. On how many paths, leading to how many 
 homes where proud Memory does all she can to fill up 
 the fireside gaps with shining shapes, must not men 
 be walking in just such pensive mood as I ? Ah, 
 young heroes, 1 safe in immortal youth as those of 
 
 1 Lowell lost three nephews, Charles Russell Lowell, James 
 Jackson Lowell and William Lowell Putnam, in the Civil War. 
 Robert Gould Shaw, who led the assault of Fort Wagner, was a 
 brother-in-law of Charles Russell Lowell. In honor of Shaw, 
 Memorice Positum was written, the last stanza of which begins, — 
 " I write of one, 
 While with dim eyes I think of three." 
 
 (Charles Russell Lowell was still living at that time.) 
 
CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 35 
 
 Homer, you at least carried your ideal hence untar- 
 nished ! It is locked for you beyond moth or rust in 
 the treasure-chamber of Death. 
 
 Is not a country, I thought, that has had such as 
 they in it, that could give such as they a brave joy in 
 dying for it, worth something, then ? And as I felt 
 more and more the soothing magic of evening's cool 
 palm upon my temples, as my fancy came home from 
 its revery, and my senses, with reawakened curiosity, 
 ran to the front windows again from the viewless 
 closet of abstraction, and felt a strange charm in find- 
 ing the old tree and shabby fence still there under 
 the travesty of falling night, nay, were conscious of an 
 unsuspected newness in familiar stars and the fading 
 outlines of hills my earliest horizon, I was conscious 
 of an immortal soul, and could not but rejoice in the 
 unwaning goodliness of the world into which I had 
 been born without any merit of my own. I thought 
 of dear Henry Vaughan's rainbow, 1 " Still young 
 and fine ! " I remembered people who had to go over 
 to the Alps to learn what the divine silence of snow 
 was, who must run to Italy before they were conscious 
 of the miracle wrought every day under their very 
 noses by the sunset, who must call upon the Berkshire 
 hills to teach them what a painter autumn was, while 
 close at hand the Fresh Pond meadows made all 
 oriels cheap with hues that showed as if a sunset-cloud 
 had been wrecked among their maples. One might 
 be worse off than even in America, I thought. 
 
 1 Henry Vaughan, a Welsh poet of the seventeenth century, 
 wrote a poem, The Rainbow, which begins, — 
 
 " Still young and fine ! but what is still in view 
 We slight as old and soil'd, though fresh and new. 
 How bright wert thou when Shem's admiring eye 
 Thy burnisht, flaming arch did first descry." 
 
36 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 There are some things so elastic that even the heavy 
 roller of democracy cannot flatten them altogether 
 down. The mind can weave itself warmly in the 
 cocoon of its own thoughts and dwell a hermit any- 
 where. A country without traditions, without en- 
 nobling associations, a scramble of parvenus, with a 
 horrible consciousness of shoddy running through 
 politics, manners, art, literature, nay, religion itself ? 
 I confess, it did not seem so to me there in that illimit- 
 able quiet, that serene self-possession of nature, where 
 Collins might have brooded his " Ode to Evening," 
 or where those verses on Solitude in Dodsley's Collec- 
 tion, that Hawthorne liked so much, might have been 
 composed. Traditions ? Granting that we had none, 
 all that is worth having in them is the common 
 property of the soul, — an estate in gavelkind for all 
 the sons of Adam, — and, moreover, if a man cannot 
 stand on his two feet (the prime quality of whoever 
 has left any tradition behind him), were it not better 
 for him to be honest about it at once, and go down on 
 all fours ? And for associations, if one have not the 
 wit to make them for himself out of native earth, no 
 ready-made ones of other men will avail much. Lex- 
 ington is none the worse to me for not being in 
 Greece, nor Gettysburg that its name is not Marathon. 
 " Blessed old fields," I was just exclaiming to myself, 
 like one of Mrs. Radcliffe's heroes, " dear acres, inno- 
 cently secure from history, which these eyes first be- 
 held, may you be also those to which they shall at last 
 slowly darken ! " when I was interrupted by a voice 
 which asked me in German whether I was the Herr 
 Professor, Doctor, So-and-so ? The " Doctor " was 
 by brevet or vaticination, to make the grade easier to 
 my pocket. 
 
CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 37 
 
 One feels so intimately assured that one is made 
 up, in part, of shreds and leavings of the past, in part 
 of the interpolations of other people, that an honest 
 man would be slow in saying yes to such a question. 
 But " my name is So-and-so " is a safe answer, and I 
 gave it. While I had been romancing with myself, 
 the street-lamps had been lighted, and it was under 
 one of these detectives that have robbed the Old Road 
 of its privilege of sanctuary after nightfall that I was 
 ambushed by my foe. The inexorable villain had 
 taken my description, it appears, that I might have 
 the less chance to escape him. Dr. Holmes tells us 
 that we change our substance, not every seven years, 
 as was once believed, but with every breath we draw. 
 Why had I not the wit to avail myself of the subter- 
 fuge, and, like Peter, to renounce my identify, espe- 
 cially, as in certain moods of mind, I have often more 
 than doubted of it myself? When a man is, as it 
 were, his own front-door, and is thus knocked at, why 
 may he not assume the right of that sacred wood to 
 make every house a castle, by denying himself to all 
 visitations ? I was truly not at home when the ques- 
 tion was put to me, but had to recall myself from all 
 out-of-doors, and to piece my self -consciousness hastily 
 together as well as I could before I answered it. 
 
 I knew perfectly well what was coming. It is sel- 
 dom that debtors or good Samaritans waylay people 
 under gas-lamps in order to force money upon them, 
 so far as I have seen or heard. I was also aware, 
 from considerable experience, that every foreigner is 
 persuaded that, by doing this country the favor of 
 coming to it, he has laid every native thereof under 
 an obligation, pecuniary or other, as the case may be, 
 whose discharge he is entitled to on demand duly 
 
38 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. . 
 
 made in person or by letter. Too much learning (of 
 this kind) had made me mad in the provincial sense 
 of the word. I had begun life with the theory of 
 giving something to every beggar that came along, 
 though sure of never finding a native-born countryman 
 among them. In a small way, I was resolved to emu- 
 late Hatem Tai's 1 tent, with its three hundred and 
 sixty-five entrances, one for every day in the year, — 
 I know not whether he was astronomer enough to add 
 another for leap-years. The beggars were a kind of 
 German-silver aristocracy ; not real plate, to be sure, 
 but better than nothing. Where everybody was over- 
 worked, they supplied the comfortable equipoise of 
 absolute leisure, so aesthetically needful. Besides, I 
 was but too conscious of a vagrant fibre in myself, 
 which too often thrilled me in my solitary walks with 
 the temptation to wander on into infinite space, and 
 by a single spasm of resolution to emancipate myself 
 from the drudgery of prosaic serfdom to respectabil- 
 ity and the regular course of things. This prompting 
 has been at times my familiar demon, and I could not 
 but feel a kind of respectful sympathy for men who 
 had dared what I had only sketched out to myself 
 as a splendid possibility. For seven years I helped 
 maintain one heroic man on an imaginary journey to 
 Portland, — as fine an example as I have ever known 
 of hopeless loyalty to an ideal. I assisted another 
 so long in a fruitless attempt to reach Mecklenburg- 
 Schwerin, that at last we grinned in each other's faces 
 when we met, like a couple of augurs. He was pos- 
 sessed by this harmless mania as some are by the 
 North Pole, and I shall never forget his look of regret- 
 ful compassion (as for one who was sacrificing his 
 1 Hatem Tai, A character in the Arabian Nights. 
 
CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 39 
 
 higher life to the fleshpots of Egypt) when I at last 
 
 advised him somewhat strenuously to go to the D — , 
 
 whither the road was so much travelled that he could 
 not miss it. General Banks, in his noble zeal for the 
 honor of his country, would confer on the Secretary 
 of State the power of imprisoning, in case of war, all 
 these seekers of the unattainable, thus by a stroke of 
 the pen annihilating the single poetic element in our 
 humdrum life. Alas ! not everybody has the genius 
 to be a Bobbin-Boy, 1 or doubtless all these also would 
 have chosen that more prosperous line of life ! But 
 moralists, sociologists, political economists, and taxes 
 have slowly convinced me that my beggarly sympathies 
 were a sin against society. Especially was the Buckle 
 doctrine of averages 2 (so flattering to our free-will) 
 persuasive with me ; for as there must be in every 
 year a certain number who would bestow an alms on 
 these abridged editions of the Wandering Jew, the 
 withdrawal of my quota could make no possible dif- 
 ference, since some destined proxy must always step 
 forward to fill my gap. Just so many misdirected 
 
 1 General N. P. Banks was called the " Bobbin-Boy " from 
 the fact of his having worked in a cotton factory in his youth. 
 
 2 Thomas Henry Buckle, in his History of Civilization in Eng- 
 land, declares that the mental laws which regulate the progress 
 of society cannot be discovered by the introspective study of the 
 individual, but only by such a comprehensive survey of facts as 
 will enable us to eliminate disturbances ; that is, by the method 
 of averages. 
 
 "The actions of individuals are greatly affected by their 
 moral feelings and passions ; but these, being antagonistic to 
 the passions and feelings of other individuals, are balanced by 
 them, so that their effect is in the great average of human 
 affairs nowhere to be seen, and the total actions of mankind, 
 considered as a whole, are left to be regulated by the total 
 knowledge of which mankind is possessed." 
 
40 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 letters every year and no more ! Would it were as 
 easy to reckon up the number of men on whose backs 
 fate has written the wrong address, so that they arrive 
 by mistake in Congress and other places where they 
 do not belong ! May not these wanderers of whom 
 I speak have been sent into the world without any 
 proper address at all ? Where is our Dead-Letter 
 Office for such ? And if wiser social arrangements 
 should furnish us with something of the sort, fancy 
 (horrible thought !) how many a workingman's friend 
 (a kind of industry in which the labor is light and the 
 wages heavy) would be sent thither because not called 
 for in the office where he at present lies ! 
 
 But I am leaving my new acquaintance too long 
 under the lamp-post. The same Gano 1 which had 
 betrayed me to him revealed to me a well-set young 
 man of about half my own age, as well dressed, so 
 far as I could see, as I was, and with every natural 
 qualification for getting his own livelihood as good, 
 if not better, than my own. He had been reduced to 
 the painful necessity of calling upon me by a series 
 of crosses beginning with the Baden Revolution 2 (for 
 which, I own, he seemed rather young, — but perhaps 
 he referred to a kind of revolution practised every 
 
 1 Gano, or Ganelon, betrayed the rear-guard of Charlemagne's 
 army in the pass of Roncesvalles, and his name has become 
 proverbial for a traitor. Mr. Lowell seems here to make a play 
 upon words, associating " lamp-post " with the Greek ganao (or 
 gano), which means "to shine." 
 
 2 The grand-duchy of Baden did not escape the revolutionary 
 impulse which emanated from France in 1848. The Republican 
 leaders, Hecker and Struve, stirred up an insurrection, and the 
 Grand Duke Leopold fled. A constituent assembly was called 
 in May, 1849. But by Prussian help, and after several battles, 
 the grand duke was reestablished on his throne. 
 
CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 41 
 
 season at Baden-Baden), 1 continued by repeated fail- 
 ures in business, for amounts which must convince me 
 of his entire respectability, and ending with our Civil 
 War. During the latter, he had served with distinc- 
 tion as a soldier, taking a main part in every impor- 
 tant battle, with a rapid list of which he favored me, 
 and no doubt would have admitted that, impartial as 
 Jonathan Wild's great ancestor, he had been on both 
 sides, had I baited him with a few hints of conserva- 
 tive opinions on a subject so distressing to a gentleman 
 wishing to profit by one's sympathy and unhappily 
 doubtful as to which way it might lean. For all these 
 reasons, and, as he seemed to imply, for his merit in 
 consenting to be born in Germany, he considered him- 
 self my natural creditor to the extent of five dollars, 
 which he would handsomely consent to accept in green- 
 backs, though he preferred specie. The offer was cer- 
 tainly a generous one, and the claim presented with an 
 assurance that carried conviction. But, unhappily, I 
 had been led to remark a curious natural phenomenon. 
 If I was ever weak enough to give anything to a peti- 
 tioner of whatever nationality, it always rained de- 
 cayed compatriots of his for a month after. Post hoc 
 ergo propter hoc 2 may not always be safe logic, but 
 here I seemed to perceive a natural connection of cause 
 and effect. Now, a few days before I had been so 
 tickled with a paper (professedly written by a benevo- 
 lent American clergyman) certifying that the bearer, 
 a hard-working German, had long " sofered with rheu- 
 matic paints in his limps," that, after copying the pas- 
 sage into my note-book, I thought it but fair to pay a 
 trifling honorarium to the author. I had pulled the 
 
 1 Baden-Baden is famed as a gambling- place. 
 
 2 After this, therefore on account of this. 
 
42 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 string of the shower-bath ! It had been running ship- 
 wrecked sailors for some time, but forthwith it began 
 to pour Teutons, redolent of lager-bier. I could not 
 help associating the apparition of my new friend with 
 this series of otherwise unaccountable phenomena. I 
 accordingly made up my mind to deny the debt, and 
 modestly did so, pleading a native bias towards impe- 
 cuniosity to the full as strong as his own. He took 
 a high tone with me at once, such as an honest man 
 would naturally take with a confessed repudiator. 
 He even brought down his proud stomach so far as to 
 join himself to me for the rest of my townward walk, 
 that he might give me his views of the American peo- 
 ple, and thus inclusively of myself. 
 
 I know not whether it is because I am pigeon- 
 livered and lack gall, or whether it is from an over- 
 mastering sense of drollery, but I am apt to submit 
 to such bastings with a patience which afterwards 
 surprises me, being not without my share of warmth 
 in the blood. Perhaps it is because I so often meet 
 with young persons who know vastly more than I do, 
 and especially with so many foreigners whose know- 
 ledge of this country is superior to my own. However 
 it may be, I listened for some time with tolerable com- 
 posure as my self-appointed lecturer gave me in detail 
 his opinions of my country and its people. America, 
 he informed me, was without arts, science, literature, 
 culture, or any native hope of supplying them. We 
 were a people wholly given to money-getting, and who, 
 having got it, knew no other use for it than to hold it 
 fast. I am fain to confess that I felt a sensible itch- 
 , ing of the biceps, and that my fingers closed with such 
 a grip as he had just informed me was one of the 
 effects of our unhappy climate. But happening just 
 
CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 43 
 
 then to be where I could avoid temptation by dodging 
 down a by-street, I hastily left him to finish his dia- 
 tribe to the lamp-post, which could stand it better 
 than I. That young man will never know how near 
 he came to being assaulted by a respectable gentleman 
 of middle age, at the corner of Church Street. I have 
 never felt quite satisfied that I did all my duty by him 
 in not knocking him down. But perhaps he might 
 have knocked me down, and then ? 
 
 The capacity of indignation makes an essential part 
 of the outfit of every honest man, but I am inclined 
 to doubt whether he is a wise one who allows himself 
 to act upon its first hints. It should be rather, I sus- 
 pect, a latent heat in the blood, which makes itself 
 felt in character, a steady reserve for the brain, warm- 
 ing the ovum of thought to life, rather than cooking 
 it by a too hasty enthusiasm in reaching the boiling- 
 point. As my pulse gradually fell back to its normal 
 beat, I reflected that I had been uncomfortably near 
 making a fool of myself, — a handy salve of euphuism 
 for our vanity, though it does not always make a just 
 allowance to Nature for her share in the business. 
 What possible claim had my Teutonic friend to rob 
 me of my composure ? I am not, I think, specially 
 thin-skinned as to other people's opinions of myself, 
 having, as I conceive, later and fuller intelligence on 
 that point than anybody else can give me. Life is 
 continually weighing us in very sensitive scales, and 
 telling every one of us precisely what his real weight 
 is to the last grain of dust. Whoever at fifty does 
 not rate himself quite as low as most of his acquaint- 
 ance would be likely to put him, must be either a fool 
 or a great man, and I humbly disclaim being either. 
 But if I was not smarting in person from any scat- 
 
44 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 tering shot of my late companion's commination, why- 
 should I grow hot at any implication of my country 
 therein ? Surely her shoulders are broad enough, if 
 yours or mine are not, to bear up under a considerable 
 avalanche of this kind. It is the bit of truth in every 
 slander, the hint of likeness in every caricature, that 
 makes us smart. " Art thou there, old Truepenny ? " l 
 How did your blade know its way so well to that one 
 loose rivet in our armor? I wondered whether Ameri- 
 cans were over-sensitive in this respect, whether they 
 were more touchy than other folks.* On the whole, 
 I thought we were not. Plutarch, who at least had 
 studied philosophy, if he had not mastered it, could 
 not stomach something Herodotus had said of Boeo- 
 tia, 2 and devoted an essay to showing up the delight- 
 ful old traveller's malice and ill-breeding. French 
 editors leave out of Montaigne's " Travels " some re- 
 marks of his about France, for reasons best known 
 to themselves. Pachydermatous Deutschland, covered 
 with trophies from every field of letters, still winces 
 under that question which Pere Bouhours 3 put two 
 centuries ago, Si un Allemand pent etre helesprit f 4 
 John Bull grew apoplectic with angry amazement at 
 the audacious persiflage of Piickler-Muskau. 5 To be 
 
 1 See Hamlet, Act I., Scene 5. Truepenny is derived from the 
 Greek trupanon, trupao, to bore or penetrate. 
 
 2 Plutarch was born at Chaeronea in Bceotia. 
 
 3 A French Jesuit author and critic. 
 
 4 If a German can be a man of wit. 
 
 5 Hermann Ludwig Heinrich, prince of Piickler-Muskau, 1785- 
 1871. A German author who was made a prince by the king of 
 Prussia in return for the relinquishment of certain privileges. 
 In his book Briefe eines Verstorbenen, he expresses himself very 
 freely about England and other countries, and also about many 
 prominent people. 
 
sure, lie was a prince, — but that was not all of it, for 
 a chance phrase of gentle Hawthorne sent a spasm 
 through all the journals of England. Then this ten- 
 derness is not peculiar to us f Console yourself, dear 
 man and brother, whatever else you may be sure of, 
 be sure at least of this, that you are dreadfully like 
 other people. Human nature- has a much greater 
 genius for sameness than for originality, or the world 
 would be at a sad pass shortly. The surprising thing 
 is that men have such a taste for this somewhat musty 
 flavor, that an Englishman, for example, should feel 
 himself defrauded, nay, even outraged, when he comes 
 over here and finds a people speaking what he admits 
 to be something like English, and yet so very differ- 
 ent from (or, as he would say, to) those he left at 
 home. Nothing, I am sure, equals my thankfulness 
 when I meet an Englishman who is not like every 
 other, or, I may add, an American of the same odd 
 turn. 
 
 Certainly it is no shame to a man that he should 
 be as nice about his country as about his sweetheart, 
 and who ever heard even the friendliest appreciation 
 of that unexpressive she that did not seem to fall in- 
 finitely short ? Yet it would hardly be wise to hold 
 every one an enemy who could not see her with our 
 own enchanted eyes. It seems to be the common 
 opinion of foreigners that Americans are too tender 
 upon this point. Perhaps we are ; and if so, there 
 must be a reason for it. Have we had fair play? 
 Could the eyes of what is called Good Society (though 
 it is so seldom true either to the adjective or noun) 
 look upon a nation of democrats with any chance of 
 receiving an undistorted image ? Were not those, 
 moreover, who found in the old order of things an 
 
46 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 earthly paradise, paying them quarterly dividends for 
 the wisdom of their ancestors, with the punctuality 
 of the seasons, unconsciously bribed to misunderstand 
 if not to misrepresent us ? Whether at war or at 
 peace, there we were, a standing menace to all earthly 
 paradises of that kind, fatal underminers of the very 
 credit on which the dividends were based, all the more 
 hateful and terrible that our destructive agency was 
 so insidious, working invisible in the elements, as it 
 seemed, active while they slept, and coming upon them 
 in the darkness like an armed man. Could Laius 
 have the proper feelings of a father towards OEdipus, 
 announced as his destined destroyer by infallible ora- 
 cles, and felt to be such by every conscious fibre of his 
 soul ? For more than a century the Dutch were the 
 laughing-stock of polite Europe. They were butter- 
 firkins, swillers of beer and schnaps, and their vrouws 
 from whom Holbein painted the ail-but loveliest of 
 Madonnas, Rembrandt the graceful girl who sits 
 immortal on his knee in Dresden, 1 and Rubens his 
 abounding goddesses, were the synonymes of clumsy 
 vulgarity. Even so late as Irving the ships of the 
 greatest navigators in the world were represented 
 as sailing equally well stern-foremost. That the aris- 
 tocratic Venetians should have 
 
 " Riveted with gigantic piles 
 Thorough the centre their new-catched miles," 
 
 was heroic. But the far more marvellous achieve- 
 ment of the Dutch in the same kind was ludicrous 
 even to republican Marvell. 2 Meanwhile, during that 
 
 1 The reference is to a portrait of Rembrandt's wife Saskia, 
 in the Dresden Gallery. 
 
 2 Andrew Marvell, an English poet and an incorruptible poli- 
 tician, of the time of Charles II. 
 
CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 47 
 
 very century of scorn, they were the best artists, 
 sailors, merchants, bankers, printers, scholars, juris- 
 consults, and statesmen in Europe, and the genius of 
 Motley has revealed them to us, earning a right to 
 themselves by the most heroic struggle in human 
 annals. But, alas ! they were not merely simple bur- 
 ghers who had fairly made themselves High Mighti- 
 nesses, and could treat on equal terms with anointed 
 kings, but their commonwealth carried in its bosom 
 the germs of democracy. They even unmuzzled, at 
 least after dark, that dreadful mastiff, the Press, 
 whose scent is, or ought to be, so keen for wolves in 
 sheep's clothing and for certain other animals in lions' 
 skins. They made fun of Sacred Majesty, and, what 
 was worse, managed uncommonly well without it. 1 In 
 an age when periwigs made so large a part of the 
 natural dignity of man, people with such a turn of 
 mind were dangerous. How could they seem other 
 than vulgar and hateful ? 
 
 In the natural course of things we succeeded to this 
 unenviable position of general butt. The Dutch had 
 thriven under it pretty well, and there was hope that 
 we could at least contrive to worry along. And we 
 certainly did in a very redoubtable fashion. Perhaps 
 we deserved some of the sarcasm more than our Dutch 
 predecessors in office. We had nothing to boast of in 
 arts or letters, and were given to bragging overmuch 
 of our merely material prosperity, due quite as much 
 to the virtue of our continent as to our own. There 
 was some truth in Carlyle's sneer, after all. Till we 
 had succeeded in some higher way than this, we had 
 only the success of physical growth. Our greatness, 
 like that of enormous Russia, was greatness on the 
 1 See Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic. 
 
48 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 map, — barbarian mass only ; but had we gone down, 
 like that other Atlantis, 1 in some vast cataclysm, we 
 should have covered but a pin's point on the chart 
 of memory, compared with those ideal spaces occupied 
 by tiny Attica and cramped England. At the same 
 time, our critics somewhat too easily forgot that ma- 
 terial must make ready the foundation for ideal tri- 
 umphs, that the arts have no chance in poor countries. 
 But it must be allowed that democracy stood for a 
 great deal in our shortcoming. The " Edinburgh Ke- 
 view " never would have thought of asking, " Who 
 reads a Russian book ? " 2 and England was satisfied 
 with iron from Sweden without being impertinently 
 
 1 An island mentioned by Plato and other classical writers. 
 The question of its real existence has been much debated. 
 
 " The most famous of all the Athenian exploits was the over- 
 throw of the island Atlantis. This was a continent lying over 
 against the pillars of Hercules, in extent greater than Libya 
 and Asia put together, and was the passage to other islands 
 and to another continent of which the Mediterranean Sea was 
 only the harbor ; and within the pillars the empire of Atlan- 
 tis reached to Egypt and Tyrrhenia. This mighty power was 
 arrayed against Egypt and Hellas and all the countries bor- 
 dering on the Mediterranean. Then did your city [Athens] 
 bravely, and won renown over the whole earth. For at the 
 peril of her own existence, and when the other Hellenes had 
 deserted her, she repelled the invader, and of her own accord 
 gave liberty to all the nations within the pillars. 
 
 " A little while afterwards there was a great earthquake, and 
 your warrior race all sank into the earth ; and the great island 
 of Atlantis also disappeared in the sea." Jowett's Introduction 
 to the Timceus of Plato. 
 
 2 Sydney Smith, in his review of Seybert's Annals of the 
 United States, published in the Edinburgh Review in 1820, asked, 
 " In the four quarters of the globe who reads an American book ? 
 or goes to an American play ? or looks at an American picture 
 or statue ? " 
 
CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 49 
 
 inquisitive after her painters and statuaries. Was it 
 that they expected too much from the mere miracle 
 of Freedom ? Is it not the highest art of a Republic 
 to make men of flesh and blood, and not the marble 
 ideals of such ? It may be fairly doubted whether we 
 have produced this higher type of man yet. Perhaps 
 it is the collective, not the individual, humanity that 
 is to have a chance of nobler development among us. 
 We shall see. We have a vast amount of imported 
 ignorance, and, still worse, of native ready-made know- 
 ledge, to digest before even the preliminaries of such 
 a consummation can be arranged. We have got to 
 learn that statesmanship is the most complicated of 
 all arts, and to come back to the apprenticeship- 
 system too hastily abandoned. At present, we trust 
 a man with making constitutions on less proof of com- 
 petence than we should demand before we gave him 
 our shoe to patch. We have nearly reached the limit 
 of the reaction from the old notion, which paid too 
 much regard to birth and station as qualifications 
 for office, and have touched the extreme point in the 
 opposite direction, putting the highest of human func- 
 tions up at auction to be bid for by any creature capa- 
 ble of going upright on two legs. In some places, 
 we have arrived at a point at which civil society is 
 no longer possible, and already another reaction has 
 begun, not backwards to the old system, but towards 
 fitness either from natural aptitude or special train- 
 ing. But will it always be safe to let evils work their 
 own cure by becoming unendurable ? Every one of 
 them leaves its taint in the constitution of the body- 
 politic, each in itself, perhaps, trifling, yet all together 
 powerful for evil. 
 
 But whatever we might do or leave undone, we 
 
50 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 were not genteel, and it was uncomfortable to be con- 
 tinually reminded that, though we should boast that 
 we were the Great West till we were black in the 
 face, it did not bring us an inch nearer to the world's 
 West-End. 1 That sacred enclosure of respectability 
 was tabooed to us. The Holy Alliance did not in- 
 scribe us on its visiting-list. The Old World of wigs 
 and orders and liveries would shop with us, but we 
 must ring at the area-bell, and not venture to awaken 
 the more august clamors of the knocker. Our man- 
 ners, it must be granted, had none of those graces 
 that stamp the caste of Yere de Vere, in whatever 
 museum of British antiquities they may be hidden. 
 In short, we were vulgar. 
 
 This was one of those horribly vague accusations, 
 the victim of which has no defence. An umbrella is 
 of no avail against a Scotch mist. It envelops you, it 
 penetrates at every pore, it wets you through without 
 seeming to wet you at all. Vulgarity is an eighth 
 deadly sin, added to the list in these latter days, and 
 worse than all the others put together, since it perils 
 your salvation in this world, — far the more impor- 
 tant of the two in the minds of most men. It profits 
 nothing to draw nice distinctions between essential 
 and conventional, for the convention in this case is 
 the essence, and you may break every command of 
 the decalogue with perfect good-breeding, nay, if you 
 are adroit, without losing caste. We, indeed, had it 
 not to lose, for we had never gained it. " How am I 
 vulgar?" asks the culprit, slmdderingly. "Because 
 thou art not like unto Us," answers Lucifer, Son of 
 the Morning, and there is no more to be said. The 
 god of this world may be a fallen angel, but he has us 
 
 1 The West-End of London is the fashionable part of the city. 
 
CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 51 
 
 there ! We were as clean, — so far as my observation 
 goes, I think we were cleaner, morally and physically, 
 than the English, and therefore, of course, than every- 
 body else. But we did not pronounce the diphthong 
 ou as they did, and we said eether and not eyther, 
 following therein the fashion of our ancestors, who 
 unhappily could bring over no English better than 
 Shakespeare's ; 1 and we did not stammer as they 
 had learned to do from the courtiers, who in this way 
 flattered the Hanoverian king, a foreigner among the 
 people he had come to reign over. Worse than all, 
 we might have the noblest ideas and the finest sen- 
 timents in the world, but we vented them through 
 that organ by which men are led rather than lead- 
 ers, though some physiologists would persuade us that 
 Nature furnishes her captains with a fine handle to 
 their faces that Opportunity may get a good purchase 
 on them for dragging them to the front. 
 
 This state of things was so painful that excellent 
 people were not wanting who gave their whole genius 
 to reproducing here the original Bull, whether by 
 gaiters, the cut of their whiskers, by a factitious bru- 
 tality in their tone, or by an accent that was forever 
 tripping and falling flat over the tangled roots of our 
 common tongue. Martyrs -to a false ideal, it never 
 occurred to them that nothing is more hateful to gods 
 and men than a second-rate Englishman, and for the 
 very reason that this planet never produced a more 
 splendid creature than the first-rate one, witness 
 Shakespeare and the Indian Mutiny. Witness that 
 truly sublime self-abnegation of those prisoners lately 
 
 1 Some forms of speech which the English of to-day are 
 pleased to call Americanisms were current in England in the 
 time of Shakespeare. 
 
52 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 among the bandits of Greece, where average men 
 gave an example of quiet fortitude for which all the 
 stoicism of antiquity can show no match. Witness 
 the wreck of the Birkenhead, an example of disci- 
 plined heroism, perhaps the most precious, as the 
 rarest, of all. If we could contrive to be not too un- 
 obtrusively our simple selves, we should be the most 
 delightful of human beings, and the most original ; 
 whereas, when the plating of Anglicism rubs off, as it 
 always will in points that come to much wear, we are 
 liable to very unpleasing conjectures about the qual- 
 ity of the metal underneath. Perhaps one reason why 
 the average Briton spreads himself here with such an 
 easy air of superiority may be owing to the fact that 
 he meets with so many bad imitations as to conclude 
 himself the only real thing in a wilderness of shams. 
 He fancies himself moving through an endless Blooms- 
 bury, 1 where his mere apparition confers honor as an 
 avatar of the court-end of the universe. Not a Bull 
 of them all but is persuaded lie bears Europa upon 
 his back. This is the sort of fellow whose patronage 
 is so divertingly insufferable. Thank Heaven he is 
 not the only specimen of cater-cousinship from the 
 dear old Mother Island that is shown to us ! Among 
 genuine things, I know nothing more genuine than 
 the better men whose limbs were made in England. 
 So manly-tender, so brave, so true, so warranted to 
 wear, they make us proud to feel that blood is thicker 
 than water. 
 
 But it is not merely the Englishman ; every Euro- 
 pean candidly admits in himself some right of primo- 
 geniture in respect of us, and pats this shaggy continent 
 on the back with a lively sense of generous unbending. 
 
 1 A district of London, once fashionable, but no longer so. 
 
CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 53 
 
 The German who plays the bass-viol has a well-founded 
 contempt, which he is not always nice in concealing, 
 for a country so few of whose children ever take that 
 noble instrument between their knees. His cousin, 
 the Ph. D. from Gottingen, cannot help despising a 
 people who do not grow loud and red over Aryans 
 and Turanians, and are indifferent about their descent 
 from either. The Frenchman feels an easy mastery 
 in speaking his mother tongue, and attributes it to 
 some native superiority of parts that lifts him high 
 above us barbarians of the West. The Italian prima 
 donna sweeps a curtsy of careless pity to the over- 
 facile pit which unsexes her with the bravo ! inno- 
 cently meant to show a familiarity with foreign usage. 
 But all without exception make no secret of regarding 
 us as the goose bound to deliver them a golden egg in 
 return for their cackle. Such men as Agassiz, Guyot, 
 and Goldwin Smith come with gifts in their hands ; 
 but since it is commonly European failures who bring 
 hither their remarkable gifts and acquirements, this 
 view of the case is sometimes just the least bit in the 
 world provoking. To think what a delicious seclu- 
 sion of contempt we enjoyed till California and our 
 own ostentatious parvenus, flinging gold away in Eu- 
 rope that might have endowed libraries at home, gave 
 us the ill repute of riches ! What a shabby downfall 
 from the Arcadia 1 which the French officers of our 
 Revolutionary War fancied they saw here through 
 Eousseau-tinted spectacles ! 2 Something of Arcadia 
 there really was, something of the Old Age ; and that 
 
 1 See Democracy, note on p. 5. 
 
 2 Rousseau's book Du Contrat Social, a somewhat visionary 
 scheme of government, exerted considerable influence during the 
 period preceding the French Revolution. 
 
54 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 divine provincialism were cheaply repurchased could 
 we have it back again in exchange for the tawdry 
 upholstery that has taken its place. 
 
 For some reason or other, the European has rarely 
 been able to see America except in caricature. Would 
 the first Review of the world have printed the niai- 
 series 1 of M. Maurice Sand as a picture of society in 
 any civilized country? M. Sand, to be sure, has in- 
 herited nothing of his famous mother's literary outfit, 
 except the pseudonym. But since the conductors of 
 the " Revue " could not have published his story be- 
 cause it was clever, they must have thought it valuable 
 for its truth. As true as the last-century English- 
 man's picture of Jean Crapaud ! 2 We do not ask to 
 be sprinkled with rosewater, but may perhaps fairly 
 protest against being drenched with the rinsings of 
 an unclean imagination. The next time the " Revue " 
 allows such ill-bred persons to throw their slops out of 
 its first-floor windows, let it honestly preface the dis- 
 charge with a gave Veau 1 3 that we may run from 
 under in season. And M. Duvergier de Hauranne, 4 
 who knows how to be entertaining ! I know that le 
 Frangais est plutbt indiscret que confiant, 5 and the 
 
 1 Niaiseries == nonsense. Mr. Lowell refers to Six Mille 
 Lieues a Toute Vapeur published in 1862 in the Revue des Deux 
 Mondes. 
 
 2 The name Jean Crapaud is applied to a Frenchman as John 
 Bull is to an Englishman. Its origin may be found in the device 
 of the ancient kings of France, three toads erect, saltant. Nos- 
 tradamus in the sixteenth century called the French "cra- 
 pauds" (toads). 
 
 3 Take care below. (Literally, Look out for the water.) 
 
 4 The reference is to M. Ernest Duvergier de Hauranne's 
 book, Huit mois en Amerique • lettres et notes de voyage 1864-65. 
 
 6 The Frenchman is indiscreet rather than presumptuous. 
 
CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 55 
 
 pen slides too easily when indiscretions will fetch so 
 much a page; but should we not have been tant-soit- 
 peu more cautious had we been writing about people 
 on the other side of the Channel? But then it is a 
 fact in the natural history of the American long fa- 
 miliar to Europeans, that he abhors privacy, knows 
 not the meaning of reserve, lives in hotels because of 
 their greater publicity, and is never so pleased as 
 when his domestic affairs (if he may be said to have 
 any) are paraded in the newspapers. Barnum, it is 
 well known, represents perfectly the average national 
 sentiment in this respect. However it be, we are not 
 treated like other people, or perhaps I should say like 
 people who are ever likely to be met with in society. 
 
 Is it in the climate ? Either I have a false notion 
 of European manners, or else the atmosphere affects 
 them strangely when exported hither. Perhaps they 
 suffer from the sea-voyage like some of the more deli- 
 cate wines. During our Civil War an English gen- 
 tleman of the highest description was kind enough to 
 call upon me, mainly, as it seemed, to inform me how 
 entirely he sympathized with the Confederates, and 
 how sure he felt that we could never subdue them, — 
 " they were the gentlemen of the country, you know." 
 Another, the first greetings hardly over, asked me how 
 I accounted for the universal meagreness of my coun- 
 trymen. To a thinner man than I, or from a stouter 
 man than he, the question might have been offensive. 
 The Marquis of Hartington x wore a secession badge 
 
 1 One of Mr. Lincoln's neatest strokes of humor was his treat- 
 ment of this gentleman when a laudable curiosity induced him to 
 be presented to the President of the Broken Bubble. Mr. Lin- 
 coln persisted in calling him Mr. Partington. Surely the refine- 
 ment of good-breeding could go no further. Giving the young 
 
56 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 at a public ball in New York. In a civilized country 
 he might have been roughly handled ; but here, where 
 the bienseances are not so well understood, of course 
 nobody minded it. A French traveller told me he 
 had been a good deal in the British colonies, and had 
 been astonished to see how soon the people became 
 Americanized. He added, with delightful bonhomie, 
 and as if he were sure it would charm me, that " they 
 even began to talk through their noses, just like you ! " 
 I was naturally ravished with this testimony to the 
 assimilating power of democracy, and could only reply 
 that I hoped they would never adopt our democratic 
 patent-method of seeming to settle one's honest debts, 
 for they would find it paying through the nose in the 
 long-run. I am a man of the New World, and do not 
 know precisely the present fashion of May-Fair, 1 but 
 I have a kind of feeling that if an American (mutato 
 nomine, de te 2 is always frightfully possible) were to 
 do this kind of thing under a European roof, it would 
 induce some disagreeable reflections as to the ethical 
 results of democracy. I read the other day in print 
 the remark of a British tourist who had eaten large 
 quantities of our salt, such as it is (I grant it has not 
 the European savor), that the Americans were hos- 
 pitable, no doubt, but that it was partly because they 
 longed for foreign visitors to relieve the tedium of 
 
 man his real name (already notorious in the newspapers) would 
 have made his visit an insult. Had Henri IV. done this, it 
 would have been famous. — J. R. L. 
 
 1 A district of London so named from a fair which formerly 
 was held there in May. As it is the abode of the upper class, 
 the name has come to be the synonym of fashion and exclu- 
 siveness. 
 
 2 Mutato nomine, de te hsec fabula narratur : Change 
 the name, and this story is told of you. 
 
CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 57 
 
 their dead-level existence, and partly from ostentation. 
 What shall we do ? Shall we close our doors ? Not 
 I, for one, if I should so have forfeited the friendship 
 of L. S., 1 most lovable of men. He somehow seems 
 to find us human, at least, and so did Clough, 2 whose 
 poetry will one of these days, perhaps, be found to 
 have been the best utterance in verse of this genera- 
 tion. And T. H., 3 the mere grasp of whose manly 
 hand carries with it the pledge of frankness and 
 friendship, of an abiding simplicity of nature as affect- 
 ing as it is rare ! 
 
 The fine old Tory aversion of former times was not 
 hard to bear. There was something even refreshing 
 in it, as in a northeaster to a hardy temperament. 
 When a British parson, travelling in Newfoundland 
 while the slash of our separation was still raw, after 
 prophesying a glorious future for an island that con- 
 tinued to dry its fish under the aegis of Saint George, 
 glances disdainfully over his spectacles in parting at 
 the U. S. A., and forebodes for them a " speedy re- 
 lapse into barbarism," now that they have madly cut 
 themselves off from the humanizing influences of Brit- 
 ain, I smile with barbarian self-conceit. But this 
 kind of thing became by degrees an unpleasant ana- 
 chronism. For meanwhile the young giant was grow- 
 ing, was beginning indeed to feel tight in his clothes, 
 was obliged to let in a gore here and there in Texas, in 
 California, in New Mexico, in Alaska, and had the 
 scissors and needle and thread ready for Canada when 
 the time came. His shadow loomed like a Brocken- 
 
 1 Leslie Stephen. 
 
 2 Arthur Hugh Clough lived in Cambridge a year during the 
 fifties, and was Lowell's near neighbor. 
 
 3 Thomas Hughes. 
 
58 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 spectre x over against Europe^ — the shadow of what 
 they were coming to, that was the unpleasant part of 
 it. Even in such misty image as they had of him, 
 it was painfully evident that his clothes were not of 
 any cut hitherto fashionable, nor conceivable by a 
 Bond Street tailor, — and this in an age, too, when 
 everything depends upon clothes, when, if we do not 
 keep up appearances, the seeming-solid frame of this 
 universe, nay, your very God, would slump into him- 
 self, like a mockery king of snow, being nothing, after 
 all, but a prevailing mode, a make-believe of believ- 
 ing. From this moment the young giant assumed the 
 respectable aspect of a phenomenon, to be got rid of 
 if possible, but at any rate as legitimate a subject of 
 human study as the glacial period or the silurian what- 
 d'ye-call-ems. If the man of the primeval drift-heaps 
 be so absorbingly interesting, why not the man of the 
 drift that is just beginning, of the drift into whose 
 irresistible current we are just being sucked whether 
 we will or no ? If I were in their place, I confess I 
 should not be frightened. Man has survived so much, 
 and contrived to be comfortable on this planet after 
 surviving so much ! I am something of a protestant 
 in matters of government also, and am willing to get 
 rid of vestments and ceremonies and to come down to 
 bare benches, if only faith in God take the place of a 
 general agreement to profess confidence in ritual and 
 sham. Every mortal man of us holds stock in the 
 
 1 Brocket! or Blocksberg is the highest summit of the Hartz 
 Mountains in Germany. The surrounding valleys at times send 
 up columns of vapor, leaving a space at the top of the mountain 
 clear, and at sunset or sunrise the shadows of persons on this 
 plateau are cast upon the bank of cloud, and produce the phe- 
 nomenon known as the Brockengespenst, or Spectre of the 
 Brocken. 
 
CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 59 
 
 only public debt that is absolutely sure of payment, 
 and that is the debt of the Maker of this Universe to 
 the Universe he has made. I have no notion of sell- 
 ing out my shares in a panic. 
 
 It was something to have advanced even to the 
 dignity of a phenomenon, and yet I do not know that 
 the relation of the individual American to the indi- 
 vidual European was bettered by it ; and that, after 
 all, must adjust itself comfortably before there can 
 be a right understanding between the two. We had 
 been a desert, we became a museum. People came 
 hither for scientific and not social ends. The very 
 cockney could not complete his education without 
 taking a vacant stare at us in passing. But the soci- 
 ologists (I think they call themselves so) were the 
 hardest to bear. There was no escape. I have even 
 known a professor of this fearful science to come dis- 
 guised in petticoats. We were cross-examined as a 
 chemist cross-examines a new substance. Human ? 
 yes, all the elements are present, though abnormally 
 combined. Civilized ? Hm ! that needs a stricter 
 assay. No entomologist could take a more friendly 
 interest in a strange bug. After a few such experi- 
 ences, I, for one, have felt as if I were merely one of 
 those horrid things preserved in spirits (and very bad 
 spirits, too) in a cabinet. I was not the fellow-being 
 of these explorers : I was a curiosity ; I was a speci- 
 men. Hath not an American organs, dimensions, 
 senses, affections, passions even as a European hath ? 
 If you prick us, do we not bleed ? If you tickle us, 
 do we not laugh ? I will not keep on with Shylock 
 to his next question but one. 1 
 
 1 "If you wrong us shall we not revenge?" Merchant of 
 Venice, Act III., Scene 1. 
 
 y 
 
' r 
 
 60 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 Till after our Civil War it never seemed to enter 
 the head of any foreigner, especially of any English- 
 man, that an American had what could be called a 
 country, except as a place to eat, sleep, and trade in. 
 Then it seemed to strike them suddenly. " By Jove, 
 you know, fellahs don't fight like that for a shop- 
 till ! " No, I rather think not. To Americans America 
 is something more than a promise and an expectation. 
 It has a past and traditions of its own. A descent 
 from men who sacrificed everything and came hither, 
 not to better their fortunes, but to plant their idea in 
 virgin soil, should be a good pedigree. There was 
 never colony save this that went forth, not to seek 
 gold, but God. Is it not as well to have sprung from 
 such as these as from some burly beggar who came 
 over with Wilhelmus Conquestor, unless, indeed, a 
 line grow better as it runs farther away from stalwart 
 ancestors ? And for our history, it is dry enough, no 
 doubt, in the books, but, for all that, is of a kind that 
 tells in the blood. I have admitted that Carlyle's 
 sneer a had a show of truth in it. But what does he 
 himself, like a true Scot, admire in the Hohenzol- 
 lerns ? First of all, that they were canny, a thrifty, 
 forehanded race. Next, that they made a good fight 
 from generation to generation with the chaos around 
 them. That is precisely the battle which the English 
 race on this continent has been pushing doughtily for- 
 ward for two centuries and a half. Doughtily and 
 silently, for you cannot hear in Europe " that crash, 
 the death - song of the perfect tree," that has been 
 going on here from sturdy father to sturdy son, and 
 making this continent habitable for the weaker Old 
 World breed that has swarmed to it during the last 
 1 See Democracy, p. 21. 
 
CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 61 
 
 half -century. If ever men did a good stroke of work 
 on this planet, it was the forefathers of those whom 
 you are wondering whether it would not be prudent to 
 acknowledge as far-off cousins. Alas, man of genius, 
 to whom we owe so much, could you see nothing more 
 than the burning of a foul chimney in that clash of 
 Michael and Satan 1 which flamed up under your very 
 eyes ? 
 
 Before our war we were to Europe but a huge mob 
 of adventurers and shopkeepers. Leigh Hunt ex- 
 pressed it well enough when he said that he could 
 never think of America without seeing a gigantic 
 counter stretched all along the seaboard. And Leigh 
 Hunt, without knowing it, had been more than half 
 Americanized, too ! Feudalism had by degrees made 
 commerce, the great civilizer, contemptible. But a 
 tradesman with sword on thigh and very prompt of 
 stroke was not only redoubtable, he had become re- 
 spectable also. Few people, I suspect, alluded twice 
 to a needle in Sir John Hawk wood's 2 presence, after 
 that doughty fighter had exchanged it for a more 
 dangerous tool of the same metal. Democracy had 
 been hitherto only a ludicrous effort to reverse the 
 laws of nature by thrusting Cleon into the place of 
 Pericles. But a democracy that could fight for an 
 abstraction, whose members held life and goods cheap 
 compared with that larger life which we call country, 
 was not merely unheard-of, but portentous. It was 
 the nightmare of the Old World taking upon itself 
 
 1 See Paradise Lost, Book VI. 
 
 2 An English adventurer who in his youth had been appren- 
 ticed to a tailor. He served with honor in the army, and was 
 knighted by Edward III. He afterward attained wealth and 
 renown in the Italian wars of the fourteenth century. 
 
 ^/ 
 
62 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 flesh and blood, turning out to be substance and not 
 dream. Since the Norman crusader clanged down 
 upon the throne of the porphyro-geniti^ 1 carefully- 
 draped appearances had never received such a shock, 
 had never been so rudely called on to produce their 
 titles to the empire of the world. Authority has had 
 its periods not unlike those of geology, and at last 
 comes Man claiming kingship in right of his mere 
 manhood. The world of the Saurians might be in 
 some respects more picturesque, but the march of 
 events is inexorable, and that world is bygone. 
 
 The young giant had certainly got out of long- 
 clothes. He had become the enfant terrible of the 
 human household. It was not and will not be easy 
 for the world (especially for our British cousins) to 
 look upon us as grown up. The youngest of nations, 
 its people must also be young and to be treated ac- 
 cordingly, was the syllogism, — as if libraries did not 
 make all nations equally old in all those respects, at 
 least, where age is an advantage and not a defect. 
 Youth, no doubt, has its good qualities, as people feel 
 who are losing it, but boyishness is another thing. 
 We had been somewhat boyish as a nation, a little 
 loud, a little pushing, a little braggart. But might 
 it not partly have been because we felt that we had 
 certain claims to respect that were not admitted ? 
 The war which established our position as a vigorous 
 nationality has also sobered us. A nation, like a man, 
 cannot look death in the eye for four years without 
 some strange reflections, without arriving at some 
 clearer consciousness of the stuff it is made of, with- 
 out some great moral change. Such a change, or the 
 
 1 Born in the purple ; a term applied to sons of a monarch 
 born after his accession to the throne. 
 
CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 63 
 
 beginning of it, no observant person can fail to see 
 here. Our thought and our politics, our bearing as 
 a people, are assuming a manlier tone. We have 
 been compelled to see what was weak in democracy 
 as well as what was strong. We have begun ob- 
 scurely to recognize that things do not go of them- 
 selves, and that popular government is not in itself 
 a panacea, is no better than any other form except 
 as the virtue and wisdom of the people make it so, and 
 that when men undertake to do their own kingship, 
 they enter upon the dangers and responsibilities as 
 well as the privileges of the function. Above all, it 
 looks as if we were on the way to be persuaded that no 
 government can be carried on by declamation. It is 
 noticeable also that facility of communication has 
 made the best English and French thought far more 
 directly operative here than ever before. Without 
 being Europeanized, our discussion of important ques- 
 tions in statesmanship, in political economy, in aesthet- 
 ics, is taking a broader scope and a higher tone. It 
 had certainly been provincial, one might almost say 
 local, to a very unpleasant extent. Perhaps our ex- 
 perience in soldiership has taught us to value training 
 more than we have been popularly wont. We may 
 possibly come to the conclusion, one of these days, 
 that self-made men may not be always equally skilful 
 in the manufacture of wisdom, may not be divinely 
 commissioned to fabricate the higher qualities of opin- 
 ion on all possible topics of human interest. 
 
 So long as we continue to be the most common- 
 schooled and the least cultivated people in the world, 
 I suppose we must consent to endure this condescend- 
 ing manner of foreigners toward us. The more 
 friendly they mean to be, the more ludicrously pro- 
 
64 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 minent it becomes. They can never appreciate the 
 immense amount of silent work that has been done 
 here, making this continent slowly fit for the abode of 
 man, and which will demonstrate itself, let us hope, 
 in the character of the people. Outsiders can only be 
 expected to judge a nation by the amount it has con- 
 tributed to the civilization of the world ; the amount, 
 that is, that can be seen and handled. A great place 
 in history can only be achieved by competitive exami- 
 nations, nay, by a long course of them. How much 
 new thought have we contributed to the common 
 stock ? Till that question can be triumphantly an- 
 swered, or needs no answer, we must continue to be 
 simply interesting as an experiment, to be studied 
 as a problem, and not respected as an attained result 
 or an accomplished solution. Perhaps, as I have 
 hinted, their patronizing manner toward us is the fair 
 result of their failing to see here anything more than 
 a poor imitation, a plaster-cast of Europe. And are 
 they not partly right ? If the tone of the uncultivated 
 American has too often the arrogance of the barbarian, 
 is not that of the cultivated as often vulgarly apolo- 
 getic ? In the America they meet with is there the 
 simplicity, the manliness, the absence of sham, the sin- 
 cere human nature, the sensitiveness to duty and im- 
 plied obligation, that in any way distinguishes us from 
 what our orators call " the effete civilization of the 
 Old World " ? Is there a politician among us daring 
 enough (except a Dana here and there : ) to risk his 
 future on the chance of our keeping our word with 
 
 1 The reference is to Richard Henry Dana, jurist, politician, 
 and author ; one of the founders of the Free Soil Party, in 1848, 
 and a life-long friend of Lowell. He was a son of Richard 
 Henry Dana, the poet and essayist. 
 
CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 65 
 
 the exactness of superstitious communities like Eng- 
 land ? Is it certain that we shall be ashamed of a 
 bankruptcy of honor, if we can only keep the letter 
 of our bond ? I hope we shall be able to answer all 
 these questions with a frank yes. At any rate, we 
 would advise our visitors that we are not merely curi- 
 ous creatures, but belong to the family of man, and 
 that, as individuals, we are not to be always subjected 
 to the competitive examination above mentioned, even 
 if we acknowledged their competence as an examin- 
 ing board. Above all, 8 we beg them to remember that 
 America is not to us, as to them, a mere object of 
 external interest to be discussed and analyzed, but in 
 us, part 'of our very marrow. Let them not suppose 
 that we conceive of ourselves as exiles from the graces 
 and amenities of an older date than we, though very 
 much at home in a state of things not yet all it might 
 be or should be, but which we mean to make so, and 
 which we find both wholesome and pleasant for men 
 (though perhaps not for dilettanti) to live in. " The 
 full tide of human existence " may be felt here as 
 keenly as Johnson felt it at Charing Cross, and in a 
 larger sense. I know one person who is singular 
 enough to think Cambridge the very best spot on the 
 habitable globe. " Doubtless God could have made 
 a better, but doubtless he never did." 1 
 
 It will take England a great while to get over her 
 airs of patronage toward us, or even passably to con- 
 ceal them. She cannot help confounding the people 
 with the country, and regarding us as lusty juveniles. 
 
 1 This saying originated with Dr. William Butler, who died 
 in England in 1621. He declared of the strawberry : " Doubt- 
 less God could have made a better berry, but doubtless he never 
 did." 
 
66 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 She has a conviction that whatever good there is in us 
 is wholly English, when the truth is that we are worth 
 nothing except so far as we have disinfected ourselves 
 of Anglicism. She is especially condescending just 
 now, and lavishes sugar-plums on us as if we had not 
 outgrown them. I am no believer in sudden conver- 
 sions, especially in sudden conversions to a favorable 
 opinion of people who have just proved you to be mis- 
 taken in judgment and therefore unwise in policy. I 
 never blamed her for not wishing well to democracy, 
 — how should she ? — but Alabamas are not wishes. 
 Let her not be too hasty in believing Mr. Keverdy 
 Johnson's 1 pleasant words. Though there is no 
 thoughtful man in America who would not Consider 
 a war with England the greatest of calamities, yet the 
 feeling towards her here is very far from cordial, 
 whatever our Minister may say in the effusion that 
 comes after ample dining. Mr. Adams, 2 with his 
 famous " My Lord, this means war," perfectly repre- 
 sented his country. Justly or not, we have a feeling 
 that we have been wronged, not merely insulted. 
 The only sure way of bringing about a healthy rela- 
 tion between the two countries is for Englishmen to 
 
 1 At the time Mr. Lowell was writing this essay the settle- 
 ment of the Alabama claims was pending. Reverdy Johnson 
 was minister to England, and his action in the matter was so 
 unsatisfactory to his own government that he was recalled. 
 
 2 During the Civil War Charles Francis Adams, who was then 
 minister to England, urged forcibly upon that nation that it 
 should not allow Confederate cruisers to be fitted out in its 
 ports. Lord Russell thought the government could not inter- 
 fere. But when, a little later, Mr. Adams informed him that 
 a certain iron-clad ram was about to leave Liverpool on its hos- 
 tile errand against the United States, and added, " It would be 
 superfluous in me to point out to your lordship that this is war," 
 means were found to prevent the vessel from sailing. 
 
CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 67 
 
 clear their minds of the notion that we are always 
 to be treated as a kind of inferior and deported Eng- 
 lishman whose nature they perfectly understand, and 
 whose back they accordingly stroke the wrong way of 
 the fur with amazing perseverance. Let them learn 
 to treat us naturally on our merits as human beings, 
 as they would a German or a Frenchman, and not as 
 if we were a kind of counterfeit Briton whose crime 
 appeared in every shade of difference, and before long 
 there would come that right feeling which we natu- 
 rally call a good understanding. The common blood, 
 and still more the common language, are fatal instru- 
 ments of misapprehension. Let them give up trying 
 to understand us, still more thinking that they do, and 
 acting in various absurd ways as the necessary conse- 
 quence, for they will never arrive at that devoutly-to- 
 be- wished consummation, till they learn to look at us 
 as we are and not as they suppose us to be. Dear old 
 long-estranged mother-in-law, it is a great many years 
 since we parted. Since 1660, when you married again, 
 you have been a step-mother to us. Put on your spec- 
 tacles, dear madam. Yes, we have grown, and changed 
 likewise. You would not let us darken your doors, 
 if you could help it. We know that perfectly well. 
 But pray, when we look to be treated as men, don't 
 shake that rattle in our faces, nor talk baby to us any 
 longer. 
 
 " Do, child, go to it grandam, child ; 
 Give grandam kingdom, and it grandam will 
 Give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig ! " 1 
 
 1 See King John, Act II., Scene 1. 
 
THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 1 
 
 Three years ago I was one of those who gathered 
 in the Sanders Theatre to commemorate the two hun- 
 dred and fiftieth anniversary of a college founded to 
 perpetuate living learning chiefly by the help of three 
 dead languages, the Hebrew, the Greek, and the 
 Latin. I have given them that order of precedence 
 which they had in the minds of those our pious 
 founders. The Hebrew came first because they be- 
 lieved that it had been spoken by God himself, and 
 that it would have been the common speech of man- 
 kind but for the judicial invention of the modern lan- 
 guages at Shinar. 2 Greek came next because the 
 New Testament was written in that tongue, and Latin 
 last as the interpreter between scholars. Of the men 
 who stood about that fateful cradle swung from bough 
 of the primeval forest, there were probably few who 
 believed that a book written in any living language 
 could itself live. 
 
 For nearly two hundred years no modern language 
 was continuously and systematically taught here. In 
 the latter half of the last century a stray Frenchman 
 was caught now and then, and kept as long as he 
 could endure the baiting of his pupils. After fail- 
 
 1 The seventh annual convention of the Modern Language 
 Association of America was held at Harvard University in De- 
 cember, 1889. The address by James Russell Lowell, which 
 follows, was the most important one of the meeting. 
 
 2 See Genesis xi. 1-9. 
 
THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 69 
 
 ing as a teacher of his mother-tongue, he commonly 
 turned dancing-master, a calling which public opinion 
 seems to have put on the same intellectual level with 
 the other. Whatever haphazard teaching of French 
 there may have been was, no doubt, for the benefit of 
 those youth of the better classes who might go abroad 
 after taking their degrees. By hook or by crook 
 some enthusiasts managed to learn German, 1 but there 
 was no official teacher before Dr. Pollen about sixty 
 years ago. When at last a chair of French and 
 Spanish was established, it was rather with an eye to 
 commerce than to culture. 
 
 It indicates a very remarkable, and, I think, whole- 
 some change in our way of looking at things that I 
 should now be addressing a numerous Society com- 
 posed wholly of men engaged in teaching thoroughly 
 and scientifically the very languages once deemed 
 unworthy to be taught at all except as a social accom- 
 plishment or as a commercial subsidiary. There are 
 now, I believe, as many teachers in that single depart- 
 ment of Harvard College as sufficed for the entire 
 undergraduate course when I took my first degree. 
 And this change has taken place within two genera- 
 tions. 
 
 Tw §' rjhrj Svo [xkv yeveal jxepoirwv avOpwiroiv 
 
 'E<£0i' 
 
 ' 2 
 
 tat? . 
 
 1 Mr. George Bancroft told me that he learned German of 
 Professor Sydney Willard, who, himself self-taught, had no 
 notion of its pronunciation. One instructor in French we had, a 
 little more than a century ago, in Albert Gallatin, a Swiss, after- 
 wards eminent as a teacher in statesmanship and diplomacy. 
 There was no regularly appointed tutor in French before 1806. — 
 J. R. L. 
 
 2 " Two ages were increased 
 Of divers-languaged men." 
 
70 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 I make this familiar quotation for two reasons : be- 
 cause Chapman translates fxepoiraiv " divers-languaged," 
 which is apt for our occasion, and because it enables 
 me to make an easier transition to what lam about to 
 say ; namely, that I rise to address you not without a 
 certain feeling of embarrassment. For every man is, 
 more or less consciously, the prisoner of his date, and 
 I must confess that I was a great while in emancipat- 
 ing myself from the formula which prescribed the 
 Greek and Latin Classics as the canonical books of 
 that infallible Church of Culture outside of which 
 there could be no salvation, — none, at least, that 
 was orthodox. Indeed, I am not sure that I have 
 wholly emancipated myself even yet. The old phrases 
 (for mere phrases they had mostly come to be) still 
 sing in my ears with a pleasing if not a prevailing 
 enchantment. 
 
 The traditions which had dictated this formula were 
 of long standing and of eminent respectability. They 
 dated back to the exemplaria Grceca of Horace. 1 For 
 centuries the languages which served men for all the 
 occasions of private life were put under a ban, and 
 the revival of learning extended this outlawry to the 
 literature, such as it was, that had found vent through 
 them. Even the authors of that literature tacitly 
 admitted the justice of such condemnation when they 
 used the word Latin as meaning language par excel- 
 lence, just as the Newfoundlanders say fish when they 
 mean cod. They could be witty, eloquent, pathetic, 
 poetical, competent, in a word, to every demand of 
 their daily lives, in their mother-tongue, as the Greeks 
 
 1 William Y. Sellar says of Horace : " In the general prin- 
 ciples which he lays down he seems to be a mere exponent of 
 the canons of Greek criticism." 
 
THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 71 
 
 and Romans had been in theirs, but all this would not 
 do ; what was so embalmed would not keep. All the 
 prudent and forethoughtful among them accordingly 
 were careful to put their thoughts and fancies, or 
 what with them supplied the place of these commodi- 
 ties, into Latin as the one infallible pickle. They 
 forgot the salt, to be sure, an ingredient which the 
 author alone can furnish. For it is not the language 
 in which a man writes, but what he has been able to 
 make that language say or sing, that resists decay. 
 Yet men were naturally a great while in reaching this 
 conviction. They thought it was not good form, as 
 the phrase is, to be pleased with what, and what alone, 
 really touched them home. The reproach — at vestri 
 proavi 1 — rang deterrent in their ears. The author 
 of " Partonopeus de Blois," 2 it is true, plucks up a 
 proper spirit : — 
 
 " Cil elerc dient que n'est pas sens 
 Qu'escrive estoire d'antif tens, 
 Quant je nes escris en latin, 
 Et que je perc mon tans enfin ; 
 Cil le perdent qui ne font rien 
 Moult plus que je ne fac le mien." 3 
 
 And the sarcasm of the last couplet was more biting 
 even than the author thought it. Those moderns who 
 wrote in Latin truly ne faisoient rien,* for I cannot 
 recollect any work of the kind that has in any sense 
 
 1 But your forefathers ! 
 
 2 An old French romantic poem ascribed to the twelfth or 
 thirteenth century. 
 
 3 If scholars say it is not wise that I should write a story of 
 ancient times unless I write it in Latin, and that, indeed, I lose 
 my time ; if they are losers who do nothing, much more I, if I 
 do not my own. 
 
 4 Did nothing. 
 
72 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 survived as literature, unless it be the " Epistolse Ob- 
 scurorum Virorum" 1 (whose Latin is a part of its 
 humor) and a few short copies of verse, as they used, 
 aptly enough, to be called. Milton's foreign corre- 
 spondence as Secretary for the Commonwealth was 
 probably the latest instance of the use of Latin in 
 diplomacy. 
 
 You all remember Du Bellay's 2 eloquent protest, 
 " I cannot sufficiently blame the foolish arrogance 
 and temerity of some of our nation, who, being least 
 of all Greeks or Latins, depreciate and reject with a 
 more than Stoic brow everything written in French, 
 and I cannot sufficiently wonder at the strange opin- 
 ion of some learned men, who think our vernacular 
 incapable of all good literature and erudition." When 
 this was said, Montaigne was already sixteen years 
 old, and, not to speak of the great mass of verse and 
 prose then dormant in manuscript, France had pro- 
 duced in Rabelais a great humorist and strangely 
 open-eyed thinker, and in Villon 3 a poet who had writ- 
 ten at least one immortal poem, which still touches us 
 
 1 Letters of Obscure Men, a collection of satirical letters in 
 dog-Latin, published in Hagenau (though professedly in Venice) 
 early in the sixteenth century, and probably written, at least in 
 part, by Ulric von Hutten. They were aimed against the 
 monks and scholastics of the time ; and by their severe criticism 
 of the doctrines, morals, and manner of life of those classes they 
 contributed forcibly to the bringing about of the Reformation. 
 
 2 Du Bellay was a French cardinal and statesman. Under 
 Francis I. he was an ambassador to Henry VIII. of England, and 
 to Pope Paul III. At one time, also, he was lieutenant-general 
 of France in the king's absence. He protected and encouraged 
 letters ; and it was at his suggestion that the College of France 
 was founded. 
 
 8 Francois Villon, the most famous French poet of the fif- 
 teenth century. His first work of importance, published in 1456, 
 
THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 73 
 
 with that painless sense of the lachrymce rerum 1 so 
 consoling in poetry and the burthen of which 
 
 Ou sont les neig-es d'antan ? " 2 
 
 falters and fades away in the ear like the last stroke 
 of Beauty's passing-bell. I must not let you forget 
 that Du Bellay had formed himself on the classics, 
 and that he insists on the assiduous study of them. 
 " Devour them," he says, " not in order to imitate, 
 but to turn them into blood and nutriment." And 
 surely this always has been and always will be their 
 true use. 
 
 It was not long before the living languages justified 
 their right to exist by producing a living literature, 
 but as the knowledge of Greek and Latin was the 
 exclusive privilege of a class, that class naturally 
 made an obstinate defence of its vested rights. Nor 
 was it less natural that men like Bacon, who felt that 
 he was speaking to the civilized world, and lesser men, 
 who fancied themselves charged with a pressing mes- 
 sage to it, should choose to utter themselves in the 
 only tongue that was cosmopolitan. But already such 
 books as had more than a provincial meaning, though 
 written in what the learned still looked on as patois, 
 were beginning to be translated into the other Euro- 
 pean languages. The invention of printing had insen- 
 sibly but surely enlarged the audience which genius 
 addresses. That there were persons in England who 
 had learned something of French, Italian, Spanish, 
 and of High and Low Dutch three centuries ago is 
 
 was one which he called Lais, but which came to be known as 
 Le Testament de Villon, or Le petit Testament, while his great 
 work is Le grand Testament. 
 
 1 Literally, the tears of things ; i. e. the sadness of life. 
 
 2 Where are the snows of last year ? 
 
74 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 shown by the dramatists of the day, but the speech 
 of the foreigner was still generally regarded as some- 
 thing noxious. Later generations shared the prejudice 
 of sturdy Abbot Samson, 1 who confirmed the manor 
 of Thorpe " cuidam Anglico natione . . . de cujus 
 fldelitate plenius confldebat quia bonus agricola erat 
 et quia nesciebat loqui Galilee." 2 This was in 1182, 
 but there is a still more amusing instance of the same 
 prejudice so lately as 1668. " Erasmus hath also a 
 notable story of a man of the same age, an Italian, 
 that had never been in Germany, and yet he spake 
 the German tongue most elegantly, being as one pos- 
 sessed of the Devil ; notwithstanding was cured by a 
 Physician that administered a medicine which expelled 
 an infinite number of worms, whereby he was also 
 freed of his knowledge of the German tongue " B 
 Dr. Ramesey seems in doubt whether the vermin or 
 the language were the greater deliverance. 
 
 Even after it could no longer be maintained that 
 no masterpiece could be written in a modern language, 
 it was affirmed, and on very plausible grounds, that 
 no masterpiece of style could be so written unless 
 after sedulous study of the ancient and especially of 
 
 1 Abbot of the Convent of St. Edmondsbury, in the time of 
 Richard Cceur de Lion and his brother John. His memory has 
 been preserved in the Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond. To 
 general readers he is known chiefly through Carlyle, who has an 
 exceedingly interesting chapter concerning him in Past and 
 Present. 
 
 2 To a certain Englishman, of whose fidelity he was the more 
 confident because he was a good farmer, and because he could 
 not speak French. 
 
 3 From a treatise on worms by William Ramesey, physician in 
 ordinary to Charles II., which contains some very direct hints of 
 the modern germ-theory of disease. — J. R. L. 
 
THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 75 
 
 the Grecian models. This may have been partially, 
 but was it entirely true? Were those elements of 
 the human mind which tease it with the longing for 
 perfection in literary workmanship peculiar to the 
 Greeks ? Before the new birth of letters, Dante 
 (though the general scheme of his great poem be 
 rather mechanical than organic) had given proof of a 
 style, which, where it is best, is so parsimonious in the 
 number of its words, so golclenly sufficient in the value 
 of them, that we must go back to Tacitus for a com- 
 parison, and perhaps not even to him for a parallel. 
 But Dante was a great genius, and language curtsies 
 to its natural kings. I will take a humbler instance, 
 the Chant-fable of " Aucassin and Nicolete," 1 rip- 
 pling into song, and subsiding from it unconsciously 
 as a brook. Leaving out the episode of the King of 
 Torelore, evidently thrust in for the groundlings, what 
 is there like it for that unpremeditated charm which 
 is beyond the reach of literary artifice and perhaps 
 does not survive the early maidenhood of language ? 
 If this be not style, then there is something better 
 than style. And is there anything so like the best 
 epigrams of Meleager 2 in grace of natural feeling, in 
 the fine tact which says all and leaves it said unblurred 
 by afterthought, as some little snatches of song by 
 nameless French minstrels of five centuries ago ? 
 
 It is instructive that, only fifty years after Du 
 Bellay wrote the passage I have quoted, Bishop Hall 3 
 
 1 A French romance of the thirteenth century, which Saints- 
 bury calls "the finest prose tale of the French Middle Ages." 
 
 2 A Greek epigrammatist of the first century B. c, famous 
 for his purity of style and the beauty of his versification. 
 
 3 Joseph Hall, bishop of Exeter, and later of Norwich, author 
 of controversial writings and Satires. 
 
76 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 was indirectly praising Sidney for having learned in 
 France and brought back with him to England that 
 very specialty of culture which we are told can only 
 be got in ancient Greece or, at Second hand, in ancient 
 Rome. Speaking of some nameless rhymer, he says 
 of him that 
 
 " He knows the grace of that new elegance 
 
 Which sweet Philisides 1 fetched late from France." 
 
 And did not Spenser (whose earliest essay in verse 
 seems to have been translated from Da Bellay) form 
 himself on French and Italian models? Did not 
 Chaucer and Gower, the shapers of our tongue, draw 
 from the same sources? Does not Higgins tell us 
 in the " Mirrour for Magistrates " that Buckhurst, 
 Phaer, Tuberville, Golding, and Gascoygne imitated 
 Marot ? Did not Montaigne prompt Bacon to his 
 Essays and Browne (unconsciously and indirectly, it 
 may be) to his " Religio Medici " ? Did not Skelton 
 borrow his so-called Skeltonian measure from France ? 
 Is not the verse of " Paradise Lost " moulded on that 
 of the " Divina Commedia " ? Did not Dryden's 
 prose and Pope's verse profit by Parisian example ? 
 Nay, in our own time, is it not whispered that more 
 than one of our masters of style in English, and they, 
 too, among the chief apostles of classic culture, owe 
 more of this mastery to Paris than to Athens or Rome ? 
 I am not going to renew the Battle of the Books, 2 nor 
 
 1 The name of a shepherd in Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. 
 In a Pastoral JEglogue upon the death of Sir Philip Sidney, pub- 
 lished in 1596, and attributed to Sir Edward Dyer, a company 
 of shepherds take up the lament in turn, each beginning, " Phi- 
 lisides is dead." 
 
 2 The Battle of the Books was written by Dean Swift to sup- 
 port his patron, Sir William Temple, in the famous Boyle and 
 
THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 11 
 
 would I be understood as questioning the rightful 
 place so long held by ancient and especially by Greek 
 literature as an element of culture and that the most 
 fruitful. But I hold this evening a brief for the 
 Modern Languages, and am bound to put their case 
 in as fair a light as I conscientiously can. Your kind- 
 ness has put me in a position where I am forced to re- 
 consider my opinions and to discover, if I can, how 
 far prejudice and tradition have had a hand in form- 
 ing them. . 
 
 I will not say with the Emperor Charles V. that a 
 man is as many men as he knows languages, and still 
 less with Lord Burleigh that such polyglottism is but 
 " to have one meat served in divers dishes." But I 
 think that to know the literature of another language, 
 whether dead or living matters not, gives us the prime 
 benefits of foreign travel. It relieves us from what 
 Richard Lassels 1 aptly calls a " moral Excommunica- 
 tion ; " it greatly widens the mind's range of view, 
 and therefore of comparison, thus strengthening the 
 judicial faculty ; and it teaches us to consider the re- 
 lations of things to each other and to some general 
 scheme rather than to ourselves ; above all, it enlarges 
 aesthetic charity. It has seemed to me also that a 
 foreign language, quite as much as a dead one, has 
 the advantage of putting whatever is written in it at 
 just such a distance as is needed for a proper mental 
 perspective. No doubt this strangeness, this novelty, 
 adds much to the pleasure we feel in reading the liter- 
 
 Bentley controversy, which originated in the violently contested 
 question of the relative superiority of ancient and modern litera- 
 ture. 
 
 1 An English Catholic priest and author of the seventeenth 
 century. 
 
 1/ 
 
78 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 ature of other languages than our own. It plays the 
 part of poet for us by putting familiar things in an 
 unaccustomed way so deftly that we feel as if we had 
 gained another sense and had ourselves a share in the 
 sorcery that is practised on us. The words of our 
 mother-tongue have been worn smooth by so often 
 rubbing against our lips or minds, while the alien 
 word has all the subtle emphasis and beauty of some 
 new-minted coin of ancient Syracuse. In our critical 
 estimates we should be on our guard against this 
 charm. 
 
 In reading such books as chiefly deserve to be read 
 in any foreign language, it is wise to translate con- 
 sciously and in words as we read. There is no such 
 help to a fuller mastery of our vernacular. It com- 
 pels us to such a choosing and testing, to so nice a 
 discrimination of sound, propriety, position, and shade 
 of meaning, that we now first learn the secret of the 
 words we have been using or misusing all our lives, 
 and are gradually made aware that to set forth even 
 the plainest matter, as it should be set forth, is not 
 only a very difficult thing, calling for thought and 
 practice, but an affair of conscience as well. Translat- 
 ing teaches us as nothing else can, not only that there 
 is a best way, but that it is the only way. Those who 
 have tried it know too well how easy it is to grasp the 
 verbal meaning of a sentence or of a verse. That is 
 the bird in the hand. The real meaning, the soul of 
 it, that which makes it literature and not jargon, that 
 is the bird in the bush which tantalizes and stimulates 
 with the vanishing glimpses we catch of it as it flits 
 from one to another lurking-place, — 
 
 " Et fugit ad saliees et se eupit ante videri." 1 
 
 1 And flies to the willows, yet wishes first to be seen. Virgil, 
 Eclogue 3, 1. 65. 
 
THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 79 
 
 After all, I am driven back to my Virgil again, 
 you see, for the happiest expression of what I was 
 trying to say. It was these shy allurements and 
 provocations of Omar Khayyam's Persian which led 
 Fitzgerald to many a peerless phrase and made an 
 original poet of him in the very act of translating. I 
 cite this instance merely by way of hint that as a spur 
 to the mind, as an open-sesame to the treasures of our 
 native vocabulary, the study of a living language 
 (for literary, not linguistic, ends) may serve as well 
 as that of any which we rather inaptly call dead. 
 
 We are told that perfection of form can be learned 
 only of the Greeks, and it is certainly true that many 
 among them attained to, or developed out of some 
 hereditary germ of aptitude, a sense of proportion 
 and of the helpful relation of parts to the whole or- 
 ganism which other races mostly grope after in vain. 
 Spenser, in the enthusiasm of his new Platonism, tells 
 us that " Soul is form, and doth the body make," and 
 no doubt this is true of the highest artistic genius. 
 Form without soul, the most obsequious observance 
 of the unities, the most perfect a priori adjustment of 
 parts, is a lifeless thing, like those machines of per- 
 petual motion admirable in every way but one — that 
 they will not go. I believe that I understand and 
 value form as much as I should, but I also believe 
 that some of those who have insisted most strongly on 
 its supreme worth as the shaping soul of a work of art 
 have imprisoned the word " soul " in a single one of 
 its many meanings and the soul itself in a single one 
 of its many functions. For the soul is not only that 
 which gives form, but that which gives life, the mys- 
 terious and pervasive essence always in itself beauti- 
 ful, not always so in the shapes which it informs, but 
 
80 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 even then full of infinite suggestion. In literature it 
 is what we call genius, an insoluble ingredient which 
 kindles, lights, inspires, and transmits impulsion to 
 other minds, wakens energies in them hitherto latent, 
 and makes them startlingly aware that they too may 
 be parts of the controlling purpose of the world. A 
 book may be great in other ways than as a lesson in 
 form, and it may be for other qualities that it is most 
 precious to us. Is it nothing, then, to have conversed 
 with genius ? Goethe's " Iphigenie " is far more per- 
 fect in form than his " Faust," which is indeed but a 
 succession of scenes strung together on a thread of 
 moral or dramatic purpose, yet it is " Faust " that we 
 read and hold dear alike for its meaning and for the 
 delight it gives us. And if we talk of classics ; what, 
 then, is a classic, if it be not a book that forever 
 delights, inspires, and surprises, — in which, and in 
 ourselves, by its help, we make new discoveries every 
 day ? What book has so warmly embosomed itself 
 in the mind and memory of men as the Iliad ? And 
 yet surely not by its perfection in form so much as by 
 the stately simplicity of its style, by its pathetic truth 
 to nature, for so loose and discursive is its plan as to 
 have supplied plausible argument for a diversity of 
 authorship. What work of classic antiquity has given 
 the branded as he would have called it, to more fruit- 
 ful thinking than the Essays of Montaigne, the most 
 planless of men who ever looked before and after, a 
 chaos indeed, but a chaos swarming with germs of 
 evolution ? There have been men of genius, like 
 Emerson, richly seminative for other minds ; like 
 Browning, full of wholesome ferment for other minds, 
 
 1 Old French = impulse. Related to French branler, to stir, 
 to move. • 
 
THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 81 
 
 though wholly destitute of any proper sense of form. 
 Yet perhaps those portions of their writings where 
 their genius has precipitated itself in perfect, if de- 
 tached and unrelated crystals, flashing back the light 
 of our common day tinged with the diviner hue of 
 their own nature, are and will continue to be a more 
 precious and fecund possession of mankind than many 
 works more praiseworthy as wholes, but in which the 
 vitality is less abounding, or seems so because more 
 evenly distributed and therefore less capable of giving 
 that electric shock which thrills through every fibre 
 of the soul. 
 
 But Samuel Daniel, an Elizabethan poet less valued 
 now than many an inferior man, has said something 
 to my purpose far better than I could have said it. 
 Nor is he a suspicious witness, for he is himself a mas- 
 ter of style. He had studied the art of writing, and 
 his diction has accordingly been less obscured by time 
 than that of most of his contemporaries. He knew 
 his classics, too, and his dullest work is the tragedy of 
 " Cleopatra " shaped on a classic model, presumably 
 Seneca, certainly not the best. But he had modern 
 instincts and a conviction that the later generations 
 of men had also their rights, among others that of 
 speaking their minds in such forms as were most con- 
 genial to them. In answer to some one who had de- 
 nounced the use of rhyme as barbarous, he wrote his 
 " Defence of Rhyme," a monument of noble and yet 
 impassioned prose. In this he says, " Suffer the 
 world to enjoy that which it knows and what it likes, 
 seeing whatsoever form of words doth move delight, 
 and sway the affections of men, in what Scythian 1 sort 
 
 1 As the Scythians were a nomadic people, the adjective de- 
 notes lack of culture and refinement. 
 
82 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 soever it be disposed and uttered, that is true number, 
 measure, eloquence, and the perfection of speech." I 
 think that Daniel's instinct guided him to a half- 
 truth, which he as usual believed to include the other 
 half also. For I have observed that truth is the only 
 object of man's ardent pursuit of which every one is 
 convinced that he, and he alone, has got the whole. 
 
 I am not sure that Form, which is the artistic sense 
 of decorum controlling the coordination of parts and 
 ensuring their harmonious subservience to a common 
 end, can be learned at all, whether of the Greeks or 
 elsewhere. I am not sure that even Style (a lower 
 form of the same faculty or quality, whichever it be), 
 which has to do with the perfection of the parts them- 
 selves, and whose triumph it is to produce the greatest 
 effect with the least possible expenditure of material, 
 — I am not sure that even this can be taught in any 
 school. If Sterne had been asked where he got that 
 style which, when he lets it alone, is as perfect as 
 any that I know, if Goldsmith had been asked where 
 he got his, so equable, so easy without being unduly 
 familiar, might they not have answered with the 
 maiden in the ballad, — 
 
 " I gat it in mymither's wame, 
 Where ye '11 get never the like " ? 
 
 But even though the susceptibility of art must be 
 inborn, yet skill in the practical application of it to 
 use may be increased, — best by practice, and very 
 far next best by example. Assuming, however, that 
 either Form or Style is to be had without the inter- 
 vention of our good fairy, we can get them, or at least 
 a wholesome misgiving that they exist and are of 
 serious import, from the French, as Sir Philip Sidney 
 and so many others have done, as not a few are doing 
 
THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 83 
 
 now. It is for other and greater virtues that I would 
 frequent the Greeks. 
 
 Browning, in the preface to his translation of the 
 " Agamemnon," says bluntly, as is his wont, " learn- 
 ing Greek teaches Greek and nothing else." One is 
 sometimes tempted to think that it teaches some other 
 language far harder than Greek when one tries to read 
 his translation. Matthew Arnold, on the other hand, 
 was never weary of insisting that the grand style 
 could be best learned of the Greeks, if not of them 
 only. I think it may be taught, or, at least, fruitfully 
 suggested, in other ways. Thirty odd years ago I 
 brought home with me from Nuremberg photographs 
 of Peter Fischer's statuettes of the twelve apostles. 
 These I used to show to my pupils and ask for a 
 guess at their size. The invariable answer was 
 " larger than life." They were really about eighteen 
 inches high, and this grandiose effect was wrought by 
 simplicity of treatment, dignity of pose, a large un- 
 fretted sweep of drapery. This object-lesson I found 
 more telling than much argument and exhortation. 
 I am glad that Arnold should have been so insistent, 
 he said so many admirable things in maintaining his 
 thesis. But I question the validity of single verses, 
 or even of three or four, as examples of style, whether 
 grand or other, and I think he would have made an 
 opponent very uncomfortable who should have ven- 
 tured to discuss Homer with as little knowledge of 
 Greek as he himself apparently had of Old French 
 when he commented on the "Chanson de Roland." 
 He cites a passage from the poem and gives in a note 
 an English version of it which is translated, not from 
 the original, but from the French rendering by Genin, 
 who was himself on no very intimate terms with the 
 
84 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 archaisms of his mother-tongue. "With what he says 
 of the poem I have little fault to find. It is said with 
 his usual urbane discretion and marked by his usual 
 steadiness of insight. But I must protest when he 
 quotes four lines, apt as they are for his purpose, as 
 an adequate sample, and then compares them with a 
 most musically pathetic passage from Homer. Who 
 is there that could escape undiminished from such a 
 comparison ? Nor do I think that he appreciated as 
 he should one quality of the poem which is essentially 
 Homeric : I mean its invigorating energy, the exhila- 
 ration of manhood and courage that exhales from it, 
 the same that Sidney felt in " Chevy Chase." 2 I be- 
 lieve we should judge a book rather by its total effect 
 than by the adequacy of special parts, and is not 
 this effect moral as well as aesthetic ? If we speak of 
 style, surely that is like good breeding, not fortuitous, 
 but characteristic, the key which gives the pitch of 
 the whole tune. If I should set some of the epithets 
 with which Achilles lays Agamemnon about the ears 
 in the first book of the Iliad in contrast with the dis- 
 pute between Roland and Oliver about blowing the 
 olifaunt, 2 I am not sure that Homer would win the 
 prize of higher breeding. Or shall I cite Hecuba's 
 
 rov iyot fxiaov r]7rap e^ot/At 
 ia-Oifxevac 7rpoo-</>vcra ? 3 
 
 The " Chanson de Roland " is to me a very interest- 
 
 1 Sir Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poesie, says, "I never 
 heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my 
 heart moved more than with a trumpet." 
 
 2 Written also olifant. The horn or bugle of Roland. It 
 was of ivory, and the legend ascribes to it a much more ringing 
 sound than to any other horn. 
 
 8 " Whose inmost vitals I were fain to fasten and feed upon." 
 
THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 85 
 
 ing and inspiring poem, certainly not to be named 
 with the Iliad for purely literary charm, but equipped 
 with the same moral qualities that have made that 
 poem dearer to mankind than any other. When I 
 am "moved more than with a trumpet," I care not 
 greatly whether it be blown by Greek or Norman 
 breath. 
 
 And this brings me back to the application of what 
 I quoted just now from Daniel. There seems to be a 
 tendency of late to value literature and even poetry 
 for their usefulness as courses of moral philosophy or 
 metaphysics, or as exercises to put and keep the men- 
 tal muscles in training. Perhaps the highest praise 
 of a book is that it sets us thinking, but surely the 
 next highest praise is that it ransoms us from thought. 
 Milton tells us that he thought Spenser " a better 
 teacher than Scotus or Aquinas," 1 but did he prize 
 him less that he lectured in a garden of Alcina ? 2 To 
 give pleasure merely is one, and not the lowest, func- 
 tion of whatever deserves to be called literature. 
 Culture, which means the opening and refining of the 
 faculties, is an excellent thing, perhaps the best, but 
 there are other things to be had of the Muses which 
 are also good in their kind. Refined pleasure is refin- 
 ing pleasure too, and teaches something in her way, 
 though she be no proper schooldame. In my weaker 
 moments I revert with a sigh, half deprecation, half 
 relief, to the old notion of literature as holiday, as 
 
 " The world's sweet inn from care and wearisome turmoil." 
 
 1 Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas, famous teachers of the- 
 ology in the thirteenth century. 
 
 2 Alcina was a fairy, the embodiment of carnal delights, who 
 figures in Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato and Ariosto's Orlando 
 Furioso. 
 
86 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 Shall I make the ignominious confession that I relish 
 Skelton's " Philip Sparowe," 1 pet of Skelton's Mais- 
 tres Jane, or parts of it, inferior though it be in form, 
 almost as much as that more fortunate pet of Lesbia ? 
 There is a wonderful joy in it to chase away ennui, 
 though it may not thrill our intellectual sensibility 
 like its Latin prototype. 
 
 And in this mood the Modern Languages add largely 
 to our resources. It may be wrong to be happy un- 
 less in the grand style, but it is perilously agreeable. 
 And shall we say that the literature of the last three 
 centuries is incompetent to put a healthy strain upon 
 the more strenuous faculties of the mind? That it 
 does not appeal to and satisfy the mind's loftier de- 
 sires ? That Dante, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Bacon, 
 Shakespeare, Cervantes, Pascal, Calderon, Lessing, 
 and he of Weimar in whom Carlyle and so many 
 others have found their University, — that none of 
 these set our thinking gear in motion to as good pur- 
 pose as any ancient of them all ? Is it less instructive 
 to study the growth of modern ideas than of ancient ? 
 Is the awakening of the modern world to conscious- 
 ness and its first tentative, then fuller, then rapturous 
 expression of it, like 
 
 — " the new-abashed nightingale 
 That stinteth first when she beginneth sing," 
 
 " Till the fledged notes at length forsake their nests, 
 Fluttering in wanton shoals," 
 
 less interesting or less instructive to us because it 
 finds a readier way to our sympathy through a pos- 
 tern which we cannot help leaving sometimes on the 
 
 1 John Skelton wrote an elaborate lament, some forty pages 
 in length, for a pet sparrow. Its Latin prototype was the poem 
 which Catullus wrote on the death of Lesbia's bird. 
 
THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 87 
 
 latch, than through the ceremonious portal of classical 
 prescription? Goethe went to the root of the matter 
 when he said, " people are always talking of the study 
 of the ancients ; yet what does this mean but apply 
 yourself to the actual world and seek to express it, 
 since this is what the ancients also did when they 
 were alive ? " That " when they were alive " has an 
 unconscious sarcasm in it. I am not ashamed to con- 
 fess that the first stammerings of our English speech 
 have a pathetic charm for me which I miss in the 
 wiser and ampler utterances of a tongue, not only 
 foreign to me as modern languages are foreign, but 
 thickened in its more delicate articulations by the 
 palsying touch of Time. And from the native wood- 
 notes of many modern lands, from what it was once 
 the fashion to call the rude beginnings of their litera- 
 ture, my fancy carries away, I think, something as pre- 
 cious as Greek or Latin could have made it. Where 
 shall I find the piteous and irreparable poverty of the 
 parvenu so poignantly typified as in the " Lai de 
 l'Oiselet " ? Where the secret password of all poetry 
 with so haunting a memory as in " Count Arnaldos," — 
 
 " Yo no digo esta cancion 
 Sino a quien conmigo va " ? 1 
 
 It is always wise to eliminate the personal equation 
 from our judgments of literature as of other things 
 that nearly concern us. But what is so subtle, so elu- 
 sive, so inapprehensible as this folle du logis ? 2 Are 
 we to be suspicious of a book's good character in pro- 
 portion as it appeals more vividly to our own private 
 consciousness and experience ? How are we to know 
 
 1 1 do not sing this song except to those who go along with 
 me. 
 
 2 Imagination. 
 
88 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 to* how many it may be making the same appeal ? Is 
 there no resource, then, but to go back humbly to the 
 old quod semiier, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus} 
 and to accept nothing as orthodox literature on which 
 the elder centuries have not laid their consecrating 
 hands ? The truth is, perhaps, that in reading ancient 
 literature many elements of false judgment, partly 
 involved in the personal equation, are inoperative, or 
 seem to be so, which, when we read a more nearly 
 neighboring literature, it is wellnigh impossible to 
 neutralize. Did not a part of Matthew Arnold's pre- 
 ference for the verses of Homer, with the thunder-roll 
 of which he sent poor old Thuroldus 2 about his busi- 
 ness, spring from a secret persuasion of their more 
 noble harmony, their more ear-bewitching canorous- 
 ness ? And yet he no doubt recited those verses in a 
 fashion which would have disqualified them as barbar- 
 ously for the ear of an ancient Greek as if they had 
 been borrowed of Thuroldus himself. Do we not see 
 here the personal fallacy's eartip ? I fancy if we could 
 call up the old jongleur and bid him sing to us, 
 accompanied by his vielle, we should find in his verses 
 a plaintive and not unimpressive melody such as so 
 strangely moves one in the untutored song of the Tus- 
 can peasant heard afar across the sun-steeped fields 
 with its prolonged fondling of the assonants. There is 
 no question about what is supreme in literature. The 
 difference between what is best and what is next best 
 is immense ; it is felt instinctively ; it is a difference 
 
 1 What always, what everywhere, what by all [has been ap- 
 proved]. 
 
 2 Thuroldus (written also Turoldus, Turold, and The'roulde) 
 is a name appended to one of the manuscripts of the Chanson de 
 Roland, but it is uncertain whether it indicates the author or 
 only a copyist, or a minstrel. 
 
THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 89 
 
 not of degree but of kind. And yet may we not with- 
 out lese-majesty say of books what Ferdinand says of 
 women, — 
 
 " for several virtues 
 Have I liked several women ; never any 
 With so full soul but some defect in her 
 Did quarrel with the noblest grace she owed 
 And put it to the f oil " ? * 
 
 In growing old one grows less fanatically punctual 
 in the practice of those austerities of taste which 
 make too constant demands on our self-denial. The 
 ages have made up their minds about the ancients. 
 While they are doing it about the moderns (and they 
 are sometimes a little long about it, having the whole 
 of time before them), may we not allow ourselves to 
 take an honest pleasure in literature far from the 
 highest, if you will, in point of form, not so far in 
 point of substance, if it comply more kindly with our 
 mood or quicken it with oppugnancy according to our 
 need ? There are books in all modern languages 
 which fulfil these conditions as perfectly as any, how- 
 ever sacred by their antiquity, can do. Were the men 
 of the Middle Ages so altogether wrong in preferring 
 Ovid because his sentiment was more in touch with 
 their own, so that he seemed more neighborly ? Or 
 the earlier dramatists in overestimating Seneca for the 
 same reason ? Whether it be from natural predisposi- 
 tion or from some occult influence of the time, there 
 are men who find in the literature of modern Europe 
 a stimulus and a satisfaction which Athens and Rome 
 deny them. If these books do not give so keen an 
 intellectual delight as the more consummate art and 
 more musical voice of Athens enabled her to give, 
 yet they establish and maintain, I am more than half 
 1 See The Tempest, Act III., Scene 1. 
 
90 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 willing to believe, more intimate and confiding rela- 
 tions with us. They open new views, they liberalize 
 us as only an acquaintance with the infinite diversity 
 of men's minds and judgments can do, they stimulate 
 to thought or tease the fancy with suggestion, and in 
 short do fairly well whatever a good book is expected 
 to do, what ancient literature did at the Revival of 
 Learning, with an effect like that which the reading 
 of Chapman's Homer had upon Keats. 1 And we must 
 not forget that the best result of this study of the 
 ancients was the begetting of the moderns, though 
 Dante somehow contrived to get born with no help 
 from the Greek Hera and little more from the Roman 
 Lucina. " 'Tis an unjust way of compute," says Sir 
 Thomas Browne, " to magnify a weak head for some 
 Latin abilities, and to undervalue a solid judgment 
 because he knows not the genealogy of Hector." 
 
 As implements of education, the modern books have 
 some advantages of their own. I am told, and I be- 
 lieve, that there is a considerable number of not unin- 
 genuous youths, who, whether from natural inaptitude 
 or want of hereditary predisposition, are honestly 
 bored by Greek and Latin, and who yet would take a 
 wholesome and vivifying interest in what was nearer 
 to their habitual modes of thought and association. 
 I would not take this for granted, I would give the 
 horse a chance at the ancient springs before I came 
 to the conclusion that he would not drink. No doubt, 
 the greater difficulty of the ancient languages is be- 
 lieved by many to be a prime recommendation of them 
 as challenging the more strenuous qualities of the 
 mind. I think there are grounds for this belief, and 
 was accordingly pleased to learn the other day that 
 1 See Keats 's On first looking into Chapman's Homer. 
 
THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 91 
 
 my eldest grandson was taking kindly to his Homer. 
 I had rather he should choose Greek than any modern 
 tongue, and I say this as a hint that I am making 
 allowance for the personal equation. The wise gods 
 have put difficulty between man and everything that 
 is worth having. But where the mind is of softer 
 fibre, and less eager of emprise, may it not be prudent 
 to open and make easy every avenue that leads to lit- 
 erature, even though it may not directly lead to those 
 summits that tax the mind and muscle only to reward 
 the climber at last with the repose of a more ethereal 
 air? 
 
 May we not conclude that modern literature, and 
 the modern languages as the way to it, should have a 
 more important place assigned to them in our courses 
 of instruction, assigned to them moreover as equals in 
 dignity, except so far as age may justly add to it, and 
 no longer to be made to feel themselves inferior by 
 being put below the salt ? That must depend on the 
 way they are taught, and this on the competence and 
 conscience of those who teach them. Already a very 
 great advance has been made. The modern languages 
 have nothing more of which to complain. There are 
 nearly as many professors and assistants employed in 
 teaching them at Harvard now as there were students 
 of them when I was in college. Students did I say ? 
 I meant boys who consented to spend an hour with 
 the professor three times a week for the express pur- 
 pose of evading study. Some of us learned so much 
 that we could say " How do you do ? " in several lan- 
 guages, and we learned little more. The real impedi- 
 ment was that we were kept forever in the elementary 
 stage, that we could look forward to no literature that 
 would have given significance to the languages and 
 
92 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 made them beneficent. It is very different now, and 
 with the number of teachers the number of students 
 has more than proportionally increased. And the 
 reason is not far to seek. The study has been made 
 more serious, more thorough, and therefore more in- 
 spiring. And it is getting to be understood that as 
 a training of the faculties, the comparative philology, 
 at least, of the modern languages may be made as ser- 
 viceable as that of the ancient. The classical super- 
 stitions of the English race made them especially be- 
 hindhand in this direction, and it was long our shame 
 that we must go to the Germans to be taught the 
 rudiments of our mother-tongue. This is no longer 
 true. Anglo-Saxon, Gothic, Old High and Middle 
 High German and Icelandic are all taught, not only 
 here, but in all our chief centres of learning. When 
 I first became interested in Old French I made a sur- 
 prising discovery. If the books which I took from 
 the College Library had been bound with gilt or 
 yellow edges, those edges stuck together as, when so 
 ornamented, they are wont to do till the leaves have 
 been turned. No one had ever opened those books 
 before. 
 
 " I was the first that ever burst 
 Into that silent sea." 1 
 
 Old French is now one of the regular courses of in- 
 struction, and not only is the language taught, but its 
 literature as well. Remembering what I remember, 
 it seems to me a wonderful thing that I should have 
 lived to see a poem in Old French edited by a young 
 American scholar (present here this evening) and 
 
 1 We were the first that ever burst 
 Into that silent sea. 
 
 Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner. 
 
THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 93 
 
 printed in the journal of this Society, a journal in 
 every way creditable to the scholarship of the coun- 
 try. Nor, as an illustration of the same advance in 
 another language, should we forget Dr. Fay's admirable 
 Concordance of the " Divina Commedia." But a more 
 gratifying illustration than any is the existence and 
 fruitful activity of this Association itself, and this 
 select concourse before me which brings scholars to- 
 gether from all parts of the land, to stimulate them 
 by personal commerce with men of kindred pursuits, 
 and to unite so many scattered energies in a single 
 force controlled by a common and invigorated pur- 
 pose. 
 
 We have every reason to congratulate ourselves on 
 the progress the modern languages have made as well 
 in academic as in popular consideration. They are 
 now taught (as they could not formerly be taught) in 
 a way that demands toil and thought of the student, 
 as Greek and Latin, and they only, used to be taught, 
 and they also open the way to higher intellectual joys, 
 to pastures new and not the worse for being so, as 
 Greek and Latin, and they only, used to do. Surely 
 many-sidedness is the very essence of culture, and it 
 matters less what a man learns than how he learns 
 it. The day will come, nay, it is dawning already, 
 when it will be understood that the masterpieces of 
 whatever language are not to be classed by an arbi- 
 trary standard, but stand on the same level in virtue 
 of being masterpieces ; that thought, imagination, and 
 fancy may make even a patois acceptable to scholars ; 
 that the poets of all climes and of all ages " sing to 
 one clear harp in divers tones ; " and that the masters 
 of prose and the masters of verse in all tongues teach 
 the same lesson and exact the same fee. 
 
94 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 I began by saying that I had no wish to renew the 
 Battle of the Books. I cannot bring myself to look 
 upon the literatures of the ancient and modern worlds 
 as antagonists, but rather as friendly rivals in the effort 
 to tear as many as may be from the barbarizing plu- 
 tolatry which seems to be so rapidly supplanting the 
 worship of what alone is lovely and enduring. No, 
 they are not antagonists, but by their points of dis- 
 parity, of likeness, or contrast, they can be best under- 
 stood, perhaps understood only through each other. 
 The scholar must have them both, but may not he who 
 has not leisure to be a scholar find profit even in the 
 lesser of the two, if that only be attainable ? Have 
 I admitted that one is the lesser ? O matre pulchra 
 filia pulchrior 1 is perhaps what I should say here. 
 
 If I did not rejoice in the wonderful advance made 
 in the comparative philology of the modern languages, 
 I should not have the face to be standing here. But 
 neither should I if I shrank from saying what I be- 
 lieved to be the truth, whether here or elsewhere. I 
 think that the purely linguistic side in the teaching 
 of them seems in the way to get more than its fitting 
 share. I insist only that in our college courses this 
 should be a separate study, and that, good as it is in 
 itself, it should, in the scheme of general instruction, 
 be restrained to its own function as the guide to some- 
 thing better. And that something better is Litera- 
 ture. Let us rescue ourselves from what Milton calls 
 " these grammatic flats and shallows." The blossoms 
 of language have certainly as much value as its roots ; 
 for if the roots secrete food and thereby transmit life 
 to the plant, yet the joyous consummation of that life 
 is in the blossoms, which alone bear the seeds that 
 1 O more beautiful daughter of a beautiful mother. 
 
THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 95 
 
 distribute and renew it in other growths. Exercise is 
 good for the muscles of mind and to keep it well in 
 hand for work, but the true end of Culture is to give 
 it play, a thing quite as needful. 
 
 What I would urge, therefore, is that no invidious 
 distinction should be made between the Old Learning 
 and the New, but that students, due regard being had 
 to their temperaments and faculties, should be encour- 
 aged to take the course in modern languages as being 
 quite as good in point of mental discipline as any 
 other, if pursued with the same thoroughness and to 
 the same end. And that end is Literature, for there 
 language first attains to a full consciousness of its 
 powers and to the delighted exercise of them. Litera- 
 ture has escaped that doom of Shinar which made our 
 Association possible, and still everywhere speaks in 
 the universal tongue of civilized man. And it is only 
 through this record of Man's joys and sorrows, of his 
 aspirations and failures, of his thought, his specula- 
 tion, and his dreams, that we can become complete 
 men, and learn both what he is and what he may be, 
 for it is the unconscious autobiography of mankind. 
 And has no page been added to it since the last an- 
 cient classic author laid down his pen ? 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 
 
 POEMS. 
 
 Cabinet Edition. 16mo, $1.00 ; half calf, $2.00 ; tree calf, flexible 
 
 calf, or flexible levant, $3.00. 
 The Same. Household Edition. With Portrait and Illustrations. 
 
 12mo, $1.50 ; full gilt, $2.00 ; half calf, $3.00 ; levant or tree calf, $4.50. 
 The Same. New Cambridge Edition. From new plates, printed 
 
 from clear type on opaque paper, and attractively bound. With a Portrait and 
 
 engraved Title-page, and a Vignette of Lowell's Home, Elmwood. 8vo, $2.00. 
 
 PROSE AND POETRY. 
 
 New Riverside Edition. Same style as Riverside Longfellow and 
 Whittier. With Portraits. The set, 12 vols, crown 8vo, gilt top, each (except 
 vols. 11 and 12), $1.50 ; vols. 11 and 12, each ,.$1.25 ; the set, 12 vols., $17.50. 
 
 Prose Works. (Vols. 1-6, 11, 12.) Separate, $11.50. Poems. (Vols. 
 7-10.) Separate, $6.00. 1-4. Literary Essays (including My Study Windows, 
 Among my Books, Fireside Travels) ; 5. Political Essays ; 6. Literary and Polit- 
 ical Addresses ; 7-10. Poems ; 11. Latest Literary Essays and Addresses ; 12. 
 The Old English Dramatists. 
 
 SEPARATE WORKS AND COMPILATIONS. 
 
 The Vision of Sir Launfal. A Poem of 
 the Search for the Holy Grail. Illus- 
 trated. 16mo, flexible leather, $1.50. 
 
 The Same. New Edition. Illustrated 
 with Photogravures from designs by 
 E. H. Garrett, and a new Portrait. 
 16mo, gilt top, $1.50. 
 
 A Fable for Critics. With outline por- 
 traits of authors mentioned, and fac- 
 simile of title-page of First Edition. 
 Crow,n 8vo, gilt top, $1.00. 
 
 The BiglOW Papers. First and Second 
 Series. New Popular Edition, 12mo, 
 $1.00; in Riverside Aldine Series, 2 
 vols., $2.00. 
 
 Democracy, and Other Addresses. 
 16mo, gilt top, $1.25. 
 
 Odes, Lyrics, and Sonnets, from the 
 Poetic Works of James Russell Lowell. 
 White and Gold Series. 16mo, gilt top, 
 $1.00 ; half levant, $3.00. 
 
 Fireside Travels. l2mo, gilt top, $1.50. 
 
 Among my Books. First Series. Sec- 
 ond Series. Each, 12mo, gilt top, $2.00. 
 
 My Study Windows. 12mo, gilt top, 
 $2.00. 
 
 Political Essays. 12mo, gilt top, $1.50. 
 Lowell Birthday Book. 32mo, $1.00. 
 Lowell Calendar Book. Containing 
 
 Selections from Lowell's Writings for 
 
 Every Day. 32mo, 25 cents. 
 Last Poems. Edited by Charles Eliot 
 
 Norton. With a fine new Portrait. 
 
 12mo, gilt top, $1.25. 
 
 FOR SCHOOL USE. 
 
 Riverside Literature Series : No. 15. Under the Old Elm, and Other Poems. 
 With a Biographical Sketch and Notes. Paper, 15 cents, net. No. 30. The 
 Vision of Sir Launfal, and Other Poems. With a Biographical Sketch, Notes, 
 and Illustrations. Paper, 15 cents, net ; cloth, 25 cents, net. (Nos. 15 and 30 
 also bound together in one volume, cloth, 40 cents, net.) No. 39. Books and 
 Libraries, and Other Papers. With Notes. Paper, 15 cents, net. No. 123. De- 
 mocracy and Other Papers. With Notes. Paper, 15 cents, net. (Nos. 39 and 
 123 also bound together in one volume, cloth, 40 cents, net.) Extra Double 
 No. M. A Fable for Critics. With Outline Portraits. 30 cents, net. Extra 
 Double No. O. Lowell Leaflets. 30 cents, net ; cloth, 40 cents, net. 
 
 Modern Classics : Vol. 5. The Vision of Sir Launfal ; The Cathedral ; Favorite 
 Poems. Vol. 31. My Garden Acquaintance ; A Good Word for Winter ; A 
 Moosehead Journal. School Edition. Each, 32mo, 40 cents, net. 
 
 Riverside School Library : The Vision of Sir Launfal, and other Verse and 
 Prose. lGmo, half leather, 60 cents, net. 
 
 Portraits. Lowell at 24, etching ; at 31 ; at 38 ; at 39 ; at 62 ; at 69. Steel, each 
 25 cents. On India paper, 75 cents. Lowell at 23, photogravure, 75 cents. At- 
 lantic Life-Size Portrait, $1.00. 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY. 
 
ROLFE'S STUDENTS' SERIES 
 
 OF 
 
 Standard English Poems for Schools and Colleger 
 
 This Series contains a number of classic English Poems, in a 
 carefully revised Text, with copious explanatory and critical Note , 
 and numerous Illustrations. The various numbers of the Series 
 are as follows : — 
 
 i. Scott's Lady of the Lake. With Map. 
 
 2o Scott's Marmion. With Map, 
 
 3. Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel. 
 
 4. Tennyson's Princess. 
 
 5. Select Poems of Tennyson. Revised Edition. Con- 
 
 taining The Lady of Shalott, The Miller's Daughter, CEnone, 
 The Lotus-Eaters, The Palace of Art, A Dream of Fair Wo- 
 men, Morte d' Arthur, The Talking Oak, Locksley Hall, The 
 Two Voices, The Brook, and the Wellington Ode, etc. 
 
 6. Tennyson's In Memoriam. 
 
 7. Tennyson's Enoch Arden, and Other Poems. Re- 
 
 vised Edition. Including Lady Clara Vere de Vere, Tithonus, 
 Rizpah, Freedom, The Golden Year, Mariana, Sea Dreams, 
 Aylmer's Field, Mariana in the South, Locksley Hall Sixty 
 Years After, etc. 
 
 8. Tennyson's Coming of Arthur, and Other Idylls of 
 
 the King. Containing The Dedication, The Coming of Arthur, 
 Gareth and Lynette, The Marriage of Geraint, Geraint and Enid, 
 Baiin and Balan, Merlin and Vivien. 
 
 9. Tennyson's Lancelot and Elaine, and Other Idylls 
 
 of the King. This volume contains the rest of the Idylls of 
 the King: Lancelot and Elaine, The Holy Grail, Pelleas and 
 Ettarre, The Last Tournament, Guinevere, The Passing ot 
 Arthur; and the concluding address to the Queen. 
 
 (8 and 9.) Tennyson's Idylls of the King. Complete 
 
 in one volume, $1.00. 
 
 10, Byron's Childe Harold. 
 
 11. Morris's Atalanta's Race, and Other Tales from 
 
 the Earthly Paradise. Each volume, 75 cents to teachers, 
 for examination, 53 cents. 
 
 A descriptive circular with sample pages and testimonials will 
 iw sent to any address on application. 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 
 
 4 PARK ST., BOSTON; 11 EAST i 7 TH ST., NEIV YORK 
 278-388 IV A BASH AVE., CHICAGO 
 
ttge mitmiu literature ^erie& 
 
 {Continued.) 
 Each regular single number, paper, 15 cents. 
 
 57. Dickens's Christmas Carol.** 
 
 58! Dickens's Cricket on tJie Hearth.** 
 
 m\ Verse and Prose for Beginners in Reading.* 
 
 fiO* 61. The Sir Roger de Coverley Papers. In two parts. | 
 
 62' John Piske's War of Independence^ 
 
 63 Longfellow's Paul Revere's Ride, and Other Poems.** 
 
 64* 65 66. Tales from Shakespeare. Edited by Charles and Mary 
 
 ' Lamb. In three parts. [Also, in one volume, linen, 50 cents.] 
 67 Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.* ** 
 m Goldsmith's Deserted Village, The Traveller, etc.* 
 69 Hawthorne's Old Manse, and A Few Mosses.** 
 TO! A Selection from Whittier's Child Life in Poetry.** 
 7l! A Selection from "Whittier's Child Lite in Prose.** 
 T2. Milton's L'Allegro, II Penseroso, Comus, Lycidas, etc.** 
 73! Tennyson's Enoch Arden, and Other Poems. 
 74* Gray's Elegy, etc.; Cowper's John Gilpin, etc. 
 75.' Scudder's George Washington.§ 
 
 76. "Wordsworth's On the Intimations of Immortality, etc, 
 77! Burns's Cotter's Saturday Night, and Other Poems. 
 78 Goldsmith's Vicar of "Wakefield. § 
 
 79. Lamb's Old China, and Other Essays of Elia. 
 
 80. Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Other Poems? 
 
 Campbell's Lochiel's "Warning, and Other Poems * 
 
 81. Holmes's Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. {Triple Number, 45 
 
 cents; linen, 50 cents.) 
 
 82. Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales.§§ 
 
 83. George Eliot's Silas Marner.§ 
 
 84. Dana's Two Years Before the Mast.§§ 
 
 85. Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days.§§ 
 
 86. Scott's Ivanhoe.§§ 
 
 87. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.§§ 
 
 88. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. §§ 
 
 89. Swift's Gulliver's Voyage to Liliiput.** 
 
 90. Swift's Gulliver's Voyage to Brobdingnag.** 
 
 Also bound in linen : * 25 cents. ** 11 and 63 in one vol., 40 cents ; likewise 40 
 
 and 69, 55 and 67, 57 and 58, 70 and 71, 72 and 94, 89 and 90. % Also in one vol., 40 
 cents. § Double Number, paper, 30 cents ; linen, 40 cents. §§ Quadruple Number, 
 paper, 50 cents ; linen, 60 cents. 
 
 EXTRA NUMBERS. 
 
 A American Authors and Their Birthdays. Programmes and Sugges- 
 tions for the Celebration of the Birthdays of Authors. By A. S. Roe. 
 
 B Portraits and Biographies of 20 American Authors. 
 
 C A Longfellow Night. For Catholic Schools and Societies. 
 
 D Literature in School. Essays by Hokace E. Scudder. 
 
 E Harriet Beecher Stowe. Dialogues and Scenes. 
 
 E Longfellow Leaflets. (Each a Double Number, 30 cents; linen, 
 
 G Whittie r Leaflets. 40 cents.) Poems and Prose Passages 
 
 H Holmes Leaflets. for Reading and Recitation. 
 
 O Lowell Leaflets. 
 
 J The Riverside Manual for Teachers, containing Suggestions and 
 Illustrative Lessons leading up to Primary Reading. By I. F. Hall. 
 
 K The Riverside Primer and Reader. (Special Number.) In paper 
 covers, with cloth back, 25 cents ; in strong; linen binding, 30 cents. 
 
 L The Riverside Song Book. Containing 120 Classic American Poems 
 set to Standard Music. (Double Number, SO cents ; boards, 40 cents.) 
 
 M Lowell's Fable for Critics. (Double Number, 30 cents.) 
 
 N Sele rions from the Writings of klevtn American Authors. (Insti- 
 tute Number.) 
 
€lje Mtmiu literature ££ene& 
 
 (Continued.) 
 Each regular single number, paper, 15 cents. 
 
 Recent Issues. 
 
 91. Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables.§§ 
 
 92. Burroughs's A Bunch of Herbs, and Oiher Papers. 
 
 93. Shakespeare's As You Like It.*** 
 
 94. Milton's Paradise Lost. Books I.-III.** 
 
 95. 9(3, 97, 98. Coope-'s Last of the Mohicans. In four parts. 
 
 (The four parts also bound in one volume, linen, 00 cents.) 
 99. Tennyson's Coming of Arthur, and Other Idylls cf the King. 
 
 100. Burke's Conciliation witn the Colonies. Edited by Robert An- 
 
 dersen, A. M.* 
 
 101. Homer's Iliad. Books I., VI., XXII., and XXIV. Translated 
 
 by Alexander Pope.* 
 
 102. Macaulay's Essays on Johnson and Goldsmith.* 
 
 103. Macaulay's Essay on Milton.* 
 
 104. Macaulay's Life and Writings of Addison.* 
 
 Nos. 102, 103, and 104 are edited by William P. Trent. 
 
 105. Carlyle's Essay on Burns. Edited by Geokge R. Notes.* 
 
 106. Shakespeare's Macbeth. Edited by Richakd Gkant White, and 
 
 furnished with Additional Notes by Helen Gray Cone.* ** 
 107, 108. Grimms' German Household Tales. With Notes. In two 
 parts. (The two parts also bound in one volume, linen, 40 cents.) 
 
 109. Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Edited by William Vaughn Moodt.§ 
 
 110. De Quincey's Flight of a Tartar Tribe. Edited by Milton 
 
 Haight Turk. With an Introduction, Notes, and Map.* 
 
 111. Tennyson's Princess. Edited by W. J. Rolfe. With copious Notes 
 
 and numerous Illustrations. (Double Number, 30 cents. Also, in Eolje's Stu- 
 dents' Series, cloth, to Teachers, 53 cents.) 
 
 112. Virgil's ./Eneid. Books I.-III. Translated by Christopher Peakse 
 
 C ranch. With an Introduction and Notes. 
 
 113. Poems from the Writings of Ralph "Waldo Emerson. Edited, 
 
 with an Introduction and Notes, by George H. Browne.** 
 
 114. Old Greek Polk Stories. Told Anew by Josp:phine Preston 
 
 Peabodt. With an Index of Mythology. Supplementary to Nos. 17 and 18, 
 22 and 23.* 
 
 115. Browning's Pied Piper of Hamelin, and Other Poems. 
 
 116. Shakespeare's Hamlet. Edited by Richard Grant White, and 
 
 furnished with Additional Notes by Helen Gray Cone. § 
 117, 118. Stories from the Arabian .Nights. With an Introductory Note. 
 (The two parts also bound in one volume, linen, 40 cents.) 
 
 119. Poe's Raven, The Pall of the House of TTster, and Other 
 
 Poems and Tales. With an Introduction and Notes.** 
 
 120. Poe's Gold-Bug, and Other Tales. With Notes.** 
 
 Nos. 119, 120 are edited by William P. Trent. 
 
 121. The Great Debate between Hayne and Webster : Hayne's Speech. 
 
 With Introductions and Notes.** 
 
 122. The Great Debate between Hayne and Webster: Webster's 
 
 Reply to Hayne. With Introductions and Notes.** 
 Nos. 121, 122, are edited by Lindsay Swift. 
 
 123. Lowell's Democracy, and Other Essays.** 
 
 Also, bound in linen : * 25 cents. ** 30 and 123 in one vol., 40 cents ; likewise 72 
 and 04, 93 and 106, 113 and 42, 110 and 120, 121 and 122. § Double number, paper, 30 
 cents i linen, 40 cents. §§ Quadruple number, paper, 50 cents ; linen, 60 cents. 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY. 
 V 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
 II II IN III Nil I Ml II II M 
 015 762 633 4