ns many a regal verse. And yet in real humorous poetry
we have been sadly deficient. Only of late years have the constant lions
by the gate begun to rouse from their strong slumber, to shake their
tawny manes, and rumble out a warning of their future prowess.

Nor is it strange that we, who were scarcely an organized people, should
have lacked this great witness to the vitality and stability of a race.
The features of a national character must be marked and prominent, and a
strong sense of a national individuality be developed, before that last,
best faculty of man is aroused, and leaps forth to maturity in verse.
The one magnificent trait of true humorous poetry is, that in its very
nature it is incapable of trivialities. It must grasp as its key-note
some vast truth, must grapple with some great injustice, must hurl its
lances at some wide-spread prejudice, or toy with the tangles of some
mighty Naerea's hair. Undines and satyrs, cupids and merry fauns, may
spring laughing from under the artist's hand, but it is from the
unyielding marble that these slender children of his mirthful hours are
carved. It was not in her infancy that Rome produced her Juvenal.
Martial and Plautus caricatured the passions of humanity after Carthage
had been destroyed and Julius Caesar had made of his tomb a city of
palaces. Aristophanes wrote when Greece had her Parthenon and had
boasted her Pericles. France had given birth to Richelieu when Moliere
assumed the sack, and England had sustained the Reformation and
conquered the land of the Cid when Butler, with his satires, shaking
church and state, appeared before her king. So with America. It was not
until wrongs were to be redressed, and unworthy ambitions to be checked,
that the voice of LOWELL'S scornful laughter was heard in the land,
piercing, with its keen cadences and mirth-provoking rhyme, the policy
of government and the ghostly armor of many a spectral faith and ism.

True, we had the famous 'Hasty Pudding' of Joel Barlow, the 'Terrible
Tractoration' of Fessenden, and Halleck's 'Fanny,' but these were mere
_jeux_, gallant little histories, over which we laughed and _voila le
tout!_ And our Astolfo, Holmes, flying by on his winged horse, sends
down now and then

'His arrowes an elle long
With pecocke well ydight,'

which we gather, and our fair dames weave into brilliant fans that
flutter and snap in many a gay assembly, and whose myriad eyes of blue
and purple smile with