Mr. Lowell had declined the suggestion that he should go to England when Mr. Hayes’s administration came in. But one need not say that when he now determined to go to England, he went there with the pleasure with which every one of our race visits what we still call the “mother country.” His ancestry, his education, and the studies in which he had taken the very broadest interest, all made him love England.

He was an American through and through, and, as his own celebrated address, which I shall speak of again, showed to the world, he comprehended democracy in its possibilities, in its future, and in its present better than almost any man of his time. He was better able to show it to the leaders of the feudal communities in which he lived, better than any other American who could have been chosen. For all this,—it would be better to say because of this,—he went and came in England with that sort of delight which Mr. Edward Everett fifty years before described so well:—

“An American looks at Westminster Abbey and Stratford-on-Avon with an enthusiasm which the Englishman laughs at as a sort of provincial rawness.”

This enthusiasm of the American in England is so genuine that one may not speak with adequate contempt of the sneers with which banished Irishmen ridiculed it, when they had occasion to speak of Mr. Lowell while he stayed in the home of his ancestors.

As minister to England Mr. Lowell rendered essential service to his country. His firmness, serenity, courtesy, and diligence enabled him to keep on the best terms with the members of the English cabinet with whom he had to do. He was to a remarkable degree, as we shall see, a favorite with all classes of the English people. He satisfied the administration of President Hayes, who sent him. He did not satisfy the more talkative leaders of the Irish-Americans, who, to use a happy phrase of his, were like an actor who “takes alternately the characters of a pair of twins who are never seen on the stage simultaneously.”

But nobody could have satisfied them. They were in a false position,—so false that even diplomacy of the old fashion could not have satisfied it. No man can serve two masters, and no man can be a citizen of two nations at the same time. So those gentlemen found out who, while, as Irishmen, they pressed the Irish people to revolt, fell back under the Ægis of America when they got into trouble. For the others, for those who had really made themselves Americans, and meant to remain such, Mr. Lowell was more than the advocate. He was their fearless guardian. And in such guardianship he was always successful. Here, let it be said, first and last, he knew nothing of the morals of that diplomacy of the older fashion. He might have directed a dispatch wrong, so that Lord Granville should read what was meant for Mr. Evarts, and Mr. Evarts what was meant for Lord Granville, and no harm would have been done. That was his way,—as, be it said, it is the way of gentlemen, and, in general, of our national negotiations.

At the same time Lowell made friends in England among all classes of people. For a generation the line of American ministers had generally been good. From time to time we sent one or two fools there, usually to get them out of the way of home aspirations and ambitions. But Mr. Everett, Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Bancroft, Mr. Adams, Mr. Welsh, and Mr. Motley were all conscientious, intelligent gentlemen, who really were as much interested in English history and English literature as Englishmen were, and “really, you know, they spoke English very well, with almost no accent, you know.”

Diplomacy, and the whole business of ambassadory, is, in fact, about as much out of place in our time as chain mail is, or as orders of precedence are. But people of sense try to make a new diplomacy in which each nation can approach, not the government of the other, but the people. Mr. Lowell, who could think on his feet, who could speak well in public, who had always something to say, and who, indeed, liked to say it, had a real “calling” in this line. In his English stay he made several public speeches which did more good than any “state paper,” so called, could have done. In private society he was a favorite, as he was everywhere. In 1882 somebody told me in London the story of an invitation which Lord Granville, the foreign minister, had sent him. Lord Granville, in a friendly note, asked him to dinner, saying at the same time that he knew how foolish it was to give such short notice “to the most engaged man in London.” Lowell replied that “the most engaged man is glad to dine with the most engaging.”

Also, London is an excellent place in which to study, and to learn without studying. And, from the first, Lowell enjoyed London and England. Mrs. Lowell was able sometimes to receive her friends, and even to bear the fatigue of a reception at court, and of presenting to the queen American ladies who visited London. She made herself most welcome in the circle, not large, whom she was able to meet in that way. The delicacy of her health, however, prevented her husband from attempting the more public social functions of hospitality, of that kind that consists mostly in calling people together to dinners or evening parties. But he was, all the same, cordial to all comers from his own nation, ready and successful in promoting their object, while, as has been said, he was at ease among all classes in England. His holidays, if we may call them so, were spent privately in visits with friends, and for six or seven summers in Whitby,—the Whitby of “Marmion,” in the north of England,—a place of which he was very fond.

He was presented and began on his formal duties in the winter of 1881–82. His stay in England lasted until June 10, 1885. Mrs. Lowell had died in February of that year.

The first important matter in his negotiations was connected with the Irish disaffection. Most general readers to-day will have forgotten that an insurrection, or plan of insurrection, attributed to the Fenian organization, had disturbed Ireland and frightened England not long before. The name Fenian was taken from Fein McCoil, the Fin-gal of Ossian. Lowell, who could never resist a pun which had any sense in it, called the Fenians Fai-nÉants, which, as it proved, was fair enough, except that they and theirs kept their English masters in alarm. I was talking with a Liberal in England in May, 1873, and he said, “Why, if you had landed in Ireland, you would have been in jail by this time.” I asked what was the matter with me. He said that my crush hat and my broad-toed shoes would have convicted me. Now the shoes had been bought in Bristol, only three days before, and I said so. “Bristol? were they? Well, they knew you were a Yankee.” That is to say, any one who looked like an outsider had to run his chances with the Irish constables of the time.

Among others who were less fortunate than I, Henry George was arrested. He was as innocent as I, and was at once released, with proper apologies.

The view which Lowell took, and the dilemma in which his Irish clients acted, and even went to prison, are well explained in a dispatch from which I will make a few short extracts. The whole collection of dispatches shows the extreme unwillingness of Lord Granville to give offense in America:—

In concluding this dispatch I may be permitted to add that I have had repeated assurances from the highest authority that there would be great reluctance in arresting a naturalized citizen of the United States, were he known to be such. But it is seldom known, and those already arrested have acted in all respects as if they were Irishmen, sometimes engaged in trade, sometimes in farming, and sometimes filling positions in the local government. This, I think, is illustrated by a phrase in one of Mr. Hart’s letters, to the effect that he never called himself an American. He endeavors, it is true, in a subsequent letter, to explain this away as meaning American born; but it is obviously absurd that a man living in his native village should need to make any such explanation. Naturalized Irishmen seem entirely to misconceive the process through which they have passed in assuming American citizenship, looking upon themselves as Irishmen who have acquired a right to American protection, rather than as Americans who have renounced a claim to Irish nationality.

Simply, the view he sustained is that which he laid down in two letters written to Mr. Barrows, to be read to one of these prisoners, from which here are a few extracts. They embody briefly the established policy of our government:—

“The principles upon which I have based my action in all cases of applications to me from naturalized citizens now imprisoned in Ireland under the ‘Coercion’ Act are those upon which our government has acted, and in case of need would act again. I think it important that all such persons should be made to understand distinctly that they cannot be Irishmen and Americans at the same time, as they now seem to suppose, and that they are subject to the operation of the laws of the country in which they choose to live.”

In another letter he says:—

“If British subjects are being arrested for no more illegal acts than those which the prisoner is charged with having committed, or of the intention to commit which he is justly suspected, it seems that, however arbitrary and despotic we may consider the ‘Coercion’ Act to be, we are, nevertheless, bound to submit in silence to the action taken under it by the authorities even against our own fellow citizens.

“It should be observed that this act is a law of the British Parliament, the legitimate source and final arbiter of all law in these realms, and that, as it would be manifestly futile to ask the government here to make an exception on behalf of an American who had brought himself within the provisions of any law thus sanctioned, so it would be manifestly unbecoming in a diplomatic representative, unless by express direction of his superiors, to enter upon an argument with the government to which he is accredited as to the policy of such a law or the necessarily arbitrary nature of its enforcement.”

That neither he nor the American government was hard on the “suspects” appears from several letters, of which this illustrates the tenor:—

You will please see without delay John McInerny and Patrick Slattery, suspects claiming to be American citizens and confined in Limerick jail, and say to each of them that “in case he should be liberated you have authority to pay him forty pounds sterling for his passage to the United States,” for which sum you may draw upon me at sight.

This sort of correspondence ended in May, 1882. The following letter was practically the end of it.

Meanwhile it is nearly certain that all the suspects, except those charged with crimes of violence, will be very shortly set at liberty, thus rendering nugatory the most effective argument in favor of disorder and resistance to the law.

To turn from such correspondence to his frank relations with the people of England, it is interesting to see how readily he accepted the modern theory of American diplomacy. This makes the foreign minister the representative not only of the administration, but of every individual among the people. It recognizes the people as indeed the sovereign. In this view, for instance, the American minister has to place rightly the inquiries of every person in the United States who thinks that there is a fortune waiting for him in the custody of the Court of Chancery. In such cases the American citizen addresses “his minister” directly. On a large scale the foreign minister has the same sort of correspondence as the “domestic minister” at home, of whose daily mail half is made up of the inquiries of people who have not an encyclopÆdia, a directory, or a dictionary, or, having them, find it more easy to address the clergyman whose name they first see in the newspaper. They turn to him to ask what was the origin of the Aryan race, or what is meant by the fourth estate.

The reader who has not delved into the diplomatic correspondence does not readily conceive of the range of subjects which thus come under the attention of an American minister abroad, in the present habit, which unites the old diplomacy and the formality of old centuries with the hustling end-of-the-century practice, in which every citizen enjoys the attention of the minister. In Lowell’s case subjects as various as the burial of John Howard Payne’s body, the foot-and-mouth disease in cattle, the theological instruction in the schools of Bulgaria, the assisted emigration to America of paupers from Ireland, and the nationality of Patrick O’Donnell occupy one year’s correspondence. Those of us who think that the old diplomacy is as much outside modern life as chain mail is, or the quintessences of old chemistry, might well take the body of John Howard Payne as an object-lesson.

(1) John Howard Payne wrote “Home Sweet Home.”

(2) 1852. He died and was buried in Tunis, where he represented the United States.

(3) 1882. Mr. W.W. Corcoran thought he should like to bury his body in America, with a proper monument.

(4) October. Mr. Corcoran asks the coÖperation of Mr. Frelinghuysen, our Secretary of State.

(5) October. Mr. Frelinghuysen writes to Mr. Lowell to ask for the intervention of the British government, because we have no representative in Tunis.

(6) November. Mr. Lowell writes to Lord Granville, the English foreign secretary.

(7) November. Lord Granville bids Mr. Lister attend to it.

(8) November. Mr. Lister writes to Mr. Reade and to Mr. Lowell to say he has done so.

(9) January, 1883. Mr. Lowell writes to Mr. Frelinghuysen to say how far they have all got.

(10) January. Mr. Frelinghuysen writes to Mr. Lowell to ask that the body may be sent to Marseilles.

(11) January. Mr. Lowell writes this to Lord Granville.

(12) January. Lord Granville telegraphs to Mr. Reade at Tunis, and writes to Mr. Lowell that he has done so.

Meanwhile they become impatient at Washington, and the Assistant Secretary telegraphs:—

January 2. “Have you received news from Tunis relative to Payne’s remains?”

Mr. Lowell telegraphs back, much as if it were the answer in the “Forty Thieves:”—

January 3. “Not yet, but presently.”

On the same day, apparently, or

January 1. Lord Granville receives a telegram from Tunis, to say that all has been done, and that the remains would be shipped to Marseilles.

January 6. Mr. Reade explains all to Lord Granville, and also to Mr. Taylor. Every one was present at the disinterment who should have been.

January 12. Mr. Lowell thanks Lord Granville and Mr. Currie and Mr. Reade and all the other officials.

February 9. Mr. Frelinghuysen asks Mr. Lowell to thank everybody; and it is to be presumed he does so.

Very well. This required a good deal of red tape. But it was very nice of Mr. Corcoran to put a monument to the poet of “Home,” and somebody must do something.

It is interesting to see how wide are the consequences of such courtesies, and how important they may be.

Lowell really wanted to serve the American people, and any intelligent question addressed to him found a courteous and intelligent reply. It would not be difficult to give a hundred instances, and if any of the diplomats of to-day sometimes groan under the burden of such correspondence, let me encourage them by copying an autograph letter of his which a friend has sent to me this morning. A public-spirited gentleman in Minnesota had determined that there should be a school of forestry in that State. He knew there was such a school in India at Dehradun. He wanted the report of that school, and so he sent to the United States legation in London to ask for it. Here is Mr. Lowell’s reply, and it is interesting to know from Mr. Andrews that it was of real service in the establishment of the first school of forestry of America:—

Dear Sir,—On receiving your letter of the 17th of February I at once wrote to Lord Hartington, who the next day sent me the report, which I now have the pleasure of forwarding to you, and especially if it helps you in awakening public opinion to the conservation of our forests ere it be too late. I foresee a time when our game and forest laws will be Draconian in proportion to their present culpable laxity.

Hon. C.C. Andrews.

A foreign minister of America once said to me that Diplomacy meant Society, and Society Diplomacy. He meant that the important things are done in personal conversation between man and man, as they sip their coffee after a dinner-party, perhaps. The conclusions thus arrived at get themselves put into form afterwards in dispatches. In this view of diplomacy it was fortunate for all parties that Mr. Lowell and Lord Granville were the correspondents who had American affairs in hand, from such “emblems” as the American flag on Lord Mayor’s Day round to the nationality of Mr. O’Connor. Fortunate, because the two liked each other.

Lord Granville’s term of office as foreign secretary was almost the same as Lowell’s as American minister. Granville came in with the Gladstone ministry in April, 1882, and he went out of office with them in 1885. Lowell’s personal relations with him were those of great intimacy. He not only regarded Lord Granville with cordial respect, but knew him as an intimate friend. In 1886 he visited Lord Granville at Holmbury, at a time when Mr. Gladstone was also visiting there. “I saw Gladstone the other day, and he was as buoyant (boyant) as when I stayed with him at Holmbury, just before he started for Scotland. I think the Fates are with him, and that the Tories will have to take up Home Rule where he left it.”

Lord Granville was very young when he entered Parliament, as Mr. Levison Gower, member for Morpeth. He is said to have regretted the change of work in the House of Lords when he became Lord Granville. In 1859, when he was not forty-five years old, the queen asked him to form a cabinet, and in 1880 she consulted him with the same view again; but he did not become chief of the ministry at either time. He served under Lord Palmerston and under Mr. Gladstone, as he had done under Lord John Russell. He was, while he lived, the leader of the Liberals in the House of Lords, always in the minority, whatever the policy of the hour, but always cordial, amiable, and conciliatory. On Gladstone’s retirement in 1878 he was spoken of as the real leader of the Liberal party. It is said of him that he always kept a friend who was once a friend,—that he was willing to yield small points in controversy rather than to keep a quarrel in existence, and always “sacrificed his personal interests to those of his party.”

Such a man is a friend whom one likes to have; and such a character gives point to Lowell’s joke, which I have cited, which calls him the most engaging man in London. I remember with pleasure the first time I saw him. He was acting as chancellor of the University of London—as long ago as 1873. He was presenting the diplomas to those who had passed the examinations for degrees of that university. This means that two or three hundred young men, from all parts of Great Britain, were presented to him, by the heads of perhaps twenty different colleges, to receive this distinction. Now, such a formality may be merely a function, as stupid to see as stupid to go through. In this case there was genuine personal contact between the chancellor and the neophyte. As each one of those youths, proud or timid, came up, and as Lord Granville gave the diploma to each, he detained him, for the moment, by some personal word or inquiry,—such as you could guess the man who was entering life would always remember. With such a man Lowell would be sure to be on sympathetic terms. And I suppose they met each other, or were in close correspondence, almost every day in the “season.”

But Lowell was not only the minister from the people; he was a messenger to the people. And he had sense enough and historical knowledge enough to know that since there has been an America on the western side of the Atlantic, the people of England—the rank and file—have been in sympathy with the thought and feeling and purposes of that American people. When my brother Charles was in London in 1863, and the English government was acting, on the whole, as badly as it dared toward the United States, a member of the cabinet said to him one day, “The clubs are against you, Mr. Hale, but the people of England are with you.” This was true then; it was true in the American Revolution; it was true in Cromwell’s time,—he has no title which is more sure than that of the “Friend of New England.” The same thing is true to-day.

Now, Lowell never said to himself, “Go to, I will address myself to the people of Great Britain,” or, “The people of Great Britain is one thing, and the clubs of London another.” But because he was the man he was, he was always glad to meet the people and the men of the people, and let them really know what America is. It is not the America of interviewers, of excursionists, of nouveaux riches millionaires, or of namby-pamby philanthropists attendant on international conventions. These are the individuals whom the people of England are most apt to see. But the people of America, at home, have wider interests than theirs, and affairs more important than they have. Lowell felt this in every fibre of his life, and if the Workingmen’s College in London, or some public meeting at Birmingham, or a Coleridge monument, gave him a chance to give to the people of England his notion of what the people of America are, and have in hand, why, he was most glad to do so.

This is no place in which to describe or discuss his successes as a public speaker in England. It was a matter of course that, as soon as he spoke once, whoever heard him would be glad to hear him again; and he must have had proposals without number for his assistance in public dinners, at the unveiling of monuments, and in addresses of wider range and of more permanent importance.

In the two volumes of admirable memoirs of English life which Mr. Smalley has published, one chapter is given quite in detail to the description of Lowell’s remarkable welcome among Englishmen of every degree. In that chapter, which I suppose is made from one or two letters published at the time, Mr. Smalley quotes “The Spectator,” as saying that Englishmen, whether they knew Mr. Lowell or not, looked on him as a personal friend.

Of all the various addresses which contributed, each in its place, to his reputation as a public speaker, that which I have alluded to, which was delivered at Birmingham, on “Democracy,” is the most remarkable. It has, indeed, become a classic. It deserves its reputation; and it undoubtedly states with careful accuracy Lowell’s foundation feeling as to the institutions of this country, and what may be expected if democracy is fairly understood and fairly applied. No one who was familiar with him or with his letters, or had really studied his more serious poems, will regard any of the utterances in this great address as being new. They were the words of a careful scholar who was born under favorable circumstances in the midst of democracy admirably well applied. His training was all the better because the original people of Massachusetts are, so to speak, democratic in their origin and in the habit of their thought, without having formed many abstract theories on the subject, and being always, indeed, quite indifferent as to what the speculative theory might be.

An American minister abroad must not be often or long absent from his post. But there are methods by which four fortnights of permitted absence may be added together, and your outing taken at once. In some way Lowell was thus free for a tour through the Continent to Italy in the autumn of 1881. In Italy he and Story and Mr. Richard Dana met. Dana was at the Wells School with him when they were little boys, and in Italy they had that most agreeable of companions, Mr. John W. Field. Dana died the next winter, and Lowell writes to Field, “The lesson for us is to close up”—“if a year or two older than I, he belonged more immediately to my own set, and I had known him life long.”

In the summer of 1882, returning from Spain to America, I spent a month in London. I told Lowell one day that I was one of the “round-the-world” correspondents of the Murray Dictionary, and that I wanted to call on Dr. Murray. He said he had been trying to do the same thing, and proposed to take me,—an invitation which, of course, I accepted.

The reader ought to know that the Oxford Dictionary, now nearly half finished, was undertaken forty-one years ago,—as early as 1857. The first suggestion was made by Dean Trench, and, at the vote of the Philological Society, several hundred readers agreed to contribute notes made in their reading of English books, for the materials of such a dictionary. After twenty-one years some specimen pages were prepared from the notes collected by such readers, and submitted by Dr. Murray to the Clarendon Press in Oxford. Dr. Murray is now known through the English-speaking world for his charge of this magnificent work, which, I think, men will always call “Murray’s Dictionary.”

The directors of the Clarendon Press agreed to assume the immense cost and charge of publication, and in 1888 the first volume of the great series, now as far forward as H and I, appeared. The contributors’ names make a very valuable list of people interested in good English. And the volumes thus far published are the treasury to which all other dictionary-makers rush as their great storehouse of materials.

For the purpose of systematic coÖperation, each reader was prepared with formal printed blanks. Each of these was to have, as far as his special reading showed, the history of one word. That word in large letters was the head of the completed blank. The reader is not necessarily an authority in language. He is a scout or truffle-dog who brings the result of his explorations to the authorities for comparison with other results.

Mill Hill, where the dictionary was then—shall I say manufactured?—is about ten miles, more or less, from the house which Lowell lived in. As we entered the cab which was to take us, he said that he should bid the cabby carry us through the back of the Park, a region which I had never seen. I have been amused since to see how many traveling Americans can say the same thing. Lowell evidently knew its turns and corners and bosks and deserts well. Ragged, barefoot boys were playing cricket in their improvised way with the most primitive of tools, such as they had constructed from the spoils of the streets. No policeman bade them leave the place, no sign intimated that they were to keep off the grass; an admirable loafers’ paradise for the real children of the public, such as there is not in our tidy Common in Boston, and such as I never saw in the Central Park of New York. It was pleasant to see how thoroughly at home Lowell was there. To such retreats in London he alludes again and again in his letters: “I have only to walk a hundred yards from my door to be in Hyde Park, where, and in Kensington Gardens, I can tread on green turf and hear the thrushes sing all winter.... As for the climate, it suits me better than any I have ever lived in.”

Spare a moment, dear reader, to find what greeted us at the Dictionary House. I doubt if they have yet invented any such name as Apotheka, or Powerhouse, or Granary. As why should they, seeing this is the only such house in the world? A circular house of corrugated iron, originally built for a church, I believe, perhaps fifty feet in diameter, perhaps twenty-five feet high, lighted from the top. It reminded me, at the instant, of the great reading-room of the British Museum, though not so large. Here was Dr. Murray, the distinguished director, at work with his staff of gentlemen and ladies. Of course he was delighted to see Lowell on the spot, and in the simplest and kindest way he showed us the method of the work.

Every day’s mail brought to this curious temple of language its new tribute to the history of the English tongue. The slips which I have tried to describe come from Cranberry Centre and Big Lick, from Edinburgh and from Hongkong. Once a month each of the thousand or more readers mails his budgets, so there would be every day a new parcel to be assorted; and we were ready for them at Mill Hill. Here were twenty or thirty thousand pamphlet-boxes into which these slips were at once sorted. The boxes were arranged in alphabetical order, beginning with that which held the slips of the title word A, and only ending, say, with box 33,333, with the box of ZYX—if there be so convenient a word in the English language.

All which I describe in this detail, because I should be glad if the reader will imagine the gay, bright, wise, and instructive talk which followed—oh, for an hour, perhaps hours—between Dr. Murray, the first authority as to English words, and Lowell, the authority most to be relied on as to the language of New England. It was not far from the time when Lowell told the Oxford gentlemen at a public dinner that they spoke English almost as well as their cousins in America. No, I do not remember what were the words these gentlemen discussed. But each was as eager as the other. Was it “doddered” or “daddock”? I do not know. “Miss Mary, will you have the goodness to bring us ‘dodder’?” And Miss Mary puts up a light ladder to her D O shelf and returns with the pasteboard box which has five and twenty uses of “dodder” between the days of Wiclif and Besant, and the two scholars dissect and discuss. You would think that Lowell had never thought of anything else. And yet it is the same Lowell who in a quiet corner of Mrs. Leo Hunter’s to-night will be discussing with Lord Granville the amount and quality of the theology which the Great Powers shall permit in the secondary schools of Bulgaria!

I must not try to give any account in detail of the company of literary men and women whom Lowell found in London. Two careful and interesting papers by Mr. Bowker, published in “Harper’s” in 1888 and 1889, are well worth the reader’s attention. From these papers I have made some lists of people, almost any one of whom you would be glad to have met, who worked their pens in London, or printed their books there, in those years. Mr. Bowker himself, as the English representative of “Harper’s,” was living there, and his personal notes of these people are valuable as they are entertaining. Of novelists alone he gives a list in which are these names:—

Wilkie Collins, Richard Doddridge Blackmore, Miss Braddon (Mrs. Maxwell), Dinah M. Craik, Thomas Hardy, Walter Besant, James Payn, David Christie Murray, Henry Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, Clark Russell.

Take those ten names only, and you say, as a lady once said to me, “Any one of them would make the fortune of a reception.” But Mr. Bowker’s next ten do not pale in comparison:—

F.W. Robinson, George Macdonald, George Meredith, W.E. Norris, Mrs. Ritchie (Anne Thackeray), Mrs. Oliphant, Amelia Blandford Edwards, Mrs. Elizabeth Lynn Linton, Miss Yonge, and Mrs. Macquoid. Observe, these twenty are only some of the novelists.

Among other men and women of letters, there are Tennyson, Browning, Hughes, Bailey, both Morrises, Domett, Taylor, Mallock, Kinglake, our dear old Martin Tupper, Stephen, Walter H. Pater, Addington Symonds, Swinburne, Buchanan, the Rossettis, Jean Ingelow, Owen Meredith, Matthew Arnold, Austin Dobson, Alfred Austin, Coventry Patmore, Gerald Massey, Max MÜller, Spencer, Tyndall and Huxley, Lubbock, and the two Cardinals, Manning and Newman. Other clergyman are Farrar, Haweis, and Spurgeon. Besides these, among men who have done more than write books, there are, in Mr. Bowker’s lists, Froude, McCarthy, and Lecky to represent history, and Dr. Smith, king of dictionaries. Smiles, the self-help man, Colvin, and Hamilton are others.

I think I may say that Lowell knew personally all the more distinguished of the persons in these very interesting groups before he left London. He formed some very tender friendships among them, and in the collection of his letters none are more affectionate, none are more entertaining, than are those to his English friends. Besides those named in the lists above there are ladies,—Mrs. Stephen, the Misses Lawrence, Mrs. Clifford; and Gordon, Du Maurier, Lord Dufferin, are mentioned as people with whom he was in pleasant relations. Lady Lyttelton was a most intimate friend of Mr. and Mrs. Lowell.

Among other intimate friends, Judge Hughes and Mrs. Hughes. Dr. Hughes, as every one knows, had been a guest at Elmwood, and Mr. Lowell during his residence as our minister in England, and in his visits there afterwards, would have thought a summer wasted indeed if he had not received the welcome of these dear friends.

With the election of Mr. Cleveland in the autumn of 1884 Lowell knew that his stay in England would come to a close. For ten or fifteen years, indeed, he had been in public antagonism to Mr. Blaine, and he would never have served under him as President in the English legation. More than this, however, Mrs. Lowell died in the spring of 1885, unexpectedly, of course, for death is always unexpected. “We had taken it for granted together that she would outlive me, and that would have been best.” How many a man and woman have had to say something like that!

She had been an invalid, with critical ups and downs. But her unfailing sympathy for him and his work had never yielded, and those who remember him in the closest intimacies of London life always speak of her with tenderness. She was almost always shut up at home, and he was everywhere, among people of all sorts and conditions. But the very difference of their lives when they were parted seemed to make their companionship more tender when they were at home.

Of his departure from England, his cousin, Mr. Abbott Lawrence Lowell, says, with truth:—

“But his usefulness as a minister far transcended the import of any specific questions that arose. It was his personal presence there, winning the respect and admiration of the English for all that is best in America, that was most valuable. Among the many surprises in Mr. Lowell’s life none is perhaps greater than that, after writing so bitterly about Mason and Slidell, he should have been instrumental in soothing the irritation between England and America that arose out of the civil war; but such is the case, and it is not too much to say that he did more than any one else towards removing the prejudice which the upper classes in England had for the United States.”

And Mr. Smalley at the time wrote from London:—

“The announcement of Mr. Lowell’s recall gives rise to many expressions of regret and good will besides those which appear in the newspapers. Nor is the expression of good will a new thing. His writings, his speeches, and his public services had brought him so close to all English-speaking people that their feeling toward him was one of affection; in short, there were ninety millions who would rejoice in any good fortune that befell him, and sympathize with him in trouble. The solicitude to know whether he was to remain minister has been general. ‘Will President Cleveland keep Mr. Lowell in London?’ is the question which every American in London has been asked over and over again since last November; perhaps twice a day on an average. And when the inquiring Briton was told that Mr. Lowell would have to go, the next question generally was, ‘What, then, did the President mean by Civil Service Reform?’”

What indeed?