d _The Last Leaf_.

"But within the last three years there has arisen in the United States
a satirist of genuine excellence, who, however, besides being but
moderately appreciated by his countrymen, seems himself in a great
measure to have mistaken his real forte. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, one of
the Boston coterie, has for some time been publishing verses, which
are by the coterie duly glorified, but which are in no respect
distinguishable from the ordinary level of American poetry, except
that they combine an extraordinary pretension to originality, with a
more than usually palpable imitation of English models. Indeed, the
failure was so manifest, that the American literati seem, in this
one case, to have rebelled against Boston dictation, and there is
sufficient internal evidence that such of them as do duty for critics
handled Mr. Lowell pretty severely. Violently piqued at this, and
simultaneously conceiving a disgust for the Mexican war, he was
impelled by both feelings to take the field as a satirist: to the
former we owe the _Fable for Critics_; to the latter, the _Biglow
Papers_. It was a happy move, for he has the rare faculty of writing
_clever doggerel_. Take out the best of _Ingoldsby_, Campbell's rare
piece of fun _The Friars of Dijon_, and perhaps a little of Walsh's
_Aristophanes_, and there is no contemporary verse of the class with
which Lowell's may not fearlessly stand a comparison; for, observe, we
are not speaking of mock heroics like Bon Gaultier's, which are only
a species of parody, but of real doggerel, the Rabelaisque of poetry.
The _Fable_ is somewhat on the Ingoldsby model,--that is to say, a
good part of its fun consists in queer rhymes, double, treble,
or poly-syllabic; and it has even Barham's fault--an occasional
over-consciousness of effort, and calling on the reader to admire, as
if the _tour de force_ could not speak for itself. But _Ingoldsby's_
rhymes will not give us a just idea of the _Fable_ until we superadd
Hook's puns; for the fabulist has a pleasant knack of making
puns--outrageous and unhesitating ones--exactly of the kind to set
off the general style of his verse. The sternest critic could hardly
help relaxing over such a bundle of them as are contained in Apollo's
lament over the 'treeification' of his Daphne.... The _Fable_ is a
sort of review in verse of American poets. Much of the Boston leaven
runs through it; the wise men of the East are all glorified intensely,
while Br