st's fancy, for in them
can abound only emptiness and cobwebs--as saith the Staphyla of
Plautus:--

'Nam hic apud nos nihil est aliud qua sti furibus,
Ita inaniis sunt oppletae atque araneis.'

Caricatures have never been disdained by the greatest minds. They were
rather the healthful diversion of their leisure hours. Even the stern
and rugged-natured artist, Annibale Caracci, was famous for his humorous
inventions, and the good Leonardo da Vinci esteemed them as most useful
exercises. We all remember the group of the Laocoon that Titian sketched
with apes, and those whole humorous poems in lines found in Herculaneum,
where Anchises and AEneas are represented with the heads of apes and
pigs. Lessing even tells us in his Laocoon that in Thebes the rage for
these _caricatura_ was so great that a law was passed forbidding the
production of any work conflicting with the severe and absolute laws of
beauty.

In quite another vein, yet transfused with the same irrepressible mirth,
we have Lowell's 'Fable for Critics,' which, with its 'preliminary notes
and few candid remarks to the reader,' is a literary curiosity whose
parallel we have not in any work by an American author. It is all one
merry outburst of youth and health, and music and poetry, with the spice
of a criticism so rare and genial, that one could almost court
dissection at his hands, for the mere exquisitely epicurean bliss of an
artistic euthanasia. It is genius on a frolic, coquetting with all the
Graces, and unearthing men long since become gnomes,

'In that country
Where are neither stars nor meadows,'

to join in his merry carousing. They float on floods of Chian and moor
their barks under 'hills of spice.' What golden wine of inspiration has
our poet drunk, whose flush is on his brow and its fire in his veins?
For every sentence of this poem is aglow with vigor and life and power;

'Its feeldes have een and its woodes have eeres.'

And if he sometimes stumbles over a metre or lets his private
friendships and preferences run away with his cool discretion and
judgment, why, _bonus dormitat Homerus_, let us, like the miser Euclio,
be thankful for the good the gods vouchsafe us. Taken in themselves and
without regard to their poetical surroundings, no more comprehensive,
faithful, concise portraitures of our authors have ever been produced.
They unite in the highest degree candor and justice, and there is withal
a tone so kindly and