on receiving a copy
of Mr. Austin Dobson's "Old World Idyls," and Fitz Adam's story,
playful, humorous, and idyllic.

In his young days, Mr. Lowell wrote much for the newspapers and
serials. To the _Dial_, the organ of the transcendentalists, he
contributed frequently, and his poems and prose will be found
scattered through the pages of _The Democratic Review_, _The North
American Review_, of which he ultimately became editor, _The
Massachusetts Quarterly Review_, and the Boston _Courier_. His prose
was well received by scholars. It is terse and strong, and whatever
position history may assign to him as a poet there can never be any
question about his place among the ablest essayists of his century.
"Fireside Travels," the first of the brilliant series of prose works
that we have, attract by their singular grace and graciousness. The
picture of Cambridge thirty years ago, is full of charming
reminiscences that must be very dear to Cambridge men and women. "The
Moosehead Journal," and "Leaves from the Journal in Italy, Happily
Turned," are rich in local color. "Among My Books," and "My Study
Windows," the addresses on literary and political topics, and the
really able paper on Democracy, which proved a formidable answer to
his critics, fill out the list of Mr. Lowell's prose contributions.
The literary essays are especially well done. Keats tinged his poetry
when he was quite a young man. He never lost taste of Endymion or the
Grecian urn, and his estimate of the poet, whose "name was writ in
water," is in excellent form and full of sympathy. Wordsworth, too, he
read and re-read with fresh delight, and it is interesting to compare
his views of the lake poet with those of Matthew Arnold. The older
poets, such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, and Pope
in English, and Dante in Italian, find in Mr. Lowell a penetrating and
helpful critic. His analyses are made with rare skill and nice
discrimination. He is never hasty in giving expression to his opinion,
and every view that he gives utterance to, exhibits the process by
which it reached its development. The thought grows under his hand,
apparently. The paper on Pope, with whose writings he was familiar at
an early age, is a most valuable one, being especially rich in
allusion and in quality. He finds something new to say about the bard
of Avon, and says it in a way which emphasizes its originality.
Indeed, every essay is a strong presentation of what Lowell