figures have a realism that is in abrupt contrast with this, and gives
a kind of doubleness and want of keeping to the whole. The Yankee
characters, in particular, and the satirical pictures of New England
country life are open to the charge of caricature. In the _Guardian
Angel_ the figure of Byles Gridley, the old scholar, is drawn with
thorough sympathy, and though some of his acts are improbable, he is,
on the whole, Holmes's most vital conception in the region of dramatic
creation.

James Russell Lowell (1819- ), the foremost of American critics and of
living American poets, is, like Holmes, a native of Cambridge, and,
like Emerson and Holmes, a clergyman's son. In 1855 he succeeded
Longfellow as professor of modern languages in Harvard College. Of
late years he has held important diplomatic posts, like Everett,
Irving, Bancroft, Motley, and other Americans distinguished in letters,
having been United States minister to Spain, and, under two
administrations, to the court of St. James. Lowell is not so
spontaneously and exclusively a poet as Longfellow, and his popularity
with the average reader has never been so great. His appeal has been
to the few rather than the many, to an audience of scholars and of the
judicious rather than to the "groundlings" of the general public.
Nevertheless his verse, though without the evenness, instinctive grace,
and unerring good taste of Longfellow's, has more energy and a stronger
intellectual fiber, while in prose he is very greatly the superior.
His first volume, _A Year's Life_, 1841, gave some promise. In 1843 he
started a magazine, the _Pioneer_, which only reached its third number,
though it counted among its contributors Hawthorne, Poe, Whittier, and
Miss Barrett (afterward Mrs. Browning). A second volume of poems,
printed in 1844, showed a distinct advance, in such pieces as the
_Shepherd of King Admetus_, _Rhoecus_, a classical myth, told in
excellent blank verse, and the same in subject with one of Landor's
polished intaglios; and the _Legend of Brittany_, a narrative poem,
which had fine passages, but no firmness in the management of the
story. As yet, it was evident, the young poet had not found his theme.
This came with the outbreak of the Mexican War, which was unpopular in
New England, and which the Free Soil party regarded as a slave-holders'
war waged without provocation against a sister republic, and simply for
the purpose of extending the area of slave