vices sure to be engendered by oppression in the governing class.
Against these and many other things I thought all honest men should
protest. I was born and bred in the country, and the dialect was homely
to me. I tried my first Biglow paper in a newspaper, and found that it
had a great run. So I wrote the others from time to time during the
year which followed, always very rapidly, and sometimes (as with 'What
Mr. Robinson thinks') at one sitting. When I came to collect them and
publish them in a volume, I conceived my parson-editor, with his
pedantry and verbosity, his amiable vanity and superiority to the verses
he was editing, as a fitting artistic background and foil. He gave me
the chance, too, of glancing obliquely at many things which were beyond
the horizon of my other characters."

There are two American books, elder brethren of "The Biglow Papers,"
which it would be unjust in an Englishman not to mention while
introducing their big younger brother to his own countrymen,--I mean, of
course, "Major Downing's Letters," and "Sam Slick;" both of which are
full of rare humour, and treat of the most exciting political questions
of their day in a method and from points of view of which we are often
reminded while reading the "Biglow Papers." In fact, Mr. Lowell borrows
his name from the Major's Letters;--"Zekel Bigelow, Broker and Banker of
Wall Street, New York," is the friend who corrects the spelling, and
certifies to the genuineness, of the honest Major's effusions,[2] and is
one of the raciest characters in the book. No one, I am sure, would be
so ready as Mr. Lowell to acknowledge whatever obligations he may have
to other men, and no one can do it more safely. For though he may owe a
name or an idea to others, he seems to me to stand quite alone amongst
Americans, and to be the only one who is beyond question entitled to
take his place in the first rank, by the side of the great political
satirists of ancient and modern Europe.

Greece had her Aristophanes; Rome her Juvenal; Spain has had her
Cervantes; France her Rabelais, her Moliere, her Voltaire; Germany her
Jean Paul, her Heine; England her Swift, her Thackeray; and America has
her Lowell. By the side of all those great masters of satire, though
kept somewhat in the rear by provincialism of style and subject, the
author of the "Biglow Papers" holds his own place distinct from each
and all. The man who reads the book for the first time, and is capable
of