yant and Halleck are studiously depreciated. But though thus
freely exercising his own critical powers in verse, the author is most
bitter against all critics in prose, and gives us a ludicrous picture
of one--

A terrible fellow to meet in society,
Not the toast that he buttered was ever so dry at tea.

And this gentleman is finely shown up for his condemnatory
predilections and inability to discern or appreciate beauties. The
cream of the joke against him is, that being sent by Apollo to
choose a lily in a flower-garden, he brings back a thistle as all he
could find. The picture is a humorous one, but we are at a loss to
conjecture who can have sat for it in America, where the tendency
is all the other way, reviewers being apt to apply the butter of
adulation with the knife of profusion to every man, woman, or child
who rushes into print. Some of his complaints, too, against the critic
sound very odd; as, for instance, that

His lore was engraft, something foreign that grew in him.

Surely the very meaning of _learning_ is that it is something which
a man learns--_acquires_ from other sources--does not originate in
himself. But it is a favorite practice with Mr. Lowell's set to rail
against dry learning and pedants, while at the same time there are no
men more fond of showing off cheap learning than themselves: Lowell
himself never loses an opportunity of bringing in a bit of Greek or
Latin. Our readers must have known such persons--for, unfortunately,
the United States has no monopoly of them--men who delight in quoting
Latin before ladies, talking Penny-Magazine science in the hearing of
clodhoppers, and preaching of high art to youths who have never had
the chance of seeing any art at all. _Then_ you will hear them say
nothing about pedantry. But let a man be present who knows more Greek
than they do, or who has a higher standard of poetry or painting or
music, and wo be to him! Him they will persecute to the uttermost.
What is to be done with such men but to treat them _a la_ Shandon,
'Give them Burton's _Anatomy_, and leave them to their own abominable
devices?'

"The _Biglow Papers_ are imaginary epistles from a New England farmer,
and contain some of the best specimens extant of the 'Yankee,' or New
England dialect,--better than Haliburton's, for Sam Slick sometimes
mixes Southern, Western, and even English vulgarities with his Yankee.
Mr. Biglow's remarks treat chiefly of the Mexican war, and subje