The late Mr. Lowell must certainly be reckoned among the famous talkers of his time.  During the years that he represented the United States in London his trim sentences, his airy omniscience, his minute and circumstantial way of laying down literary law, were the inevitable ornaments of serious dinners and cultured tea-tables.  My first encounter with Mr. Lowell took place many years before he entered on his diplomatic career.  It was in 1872, when I chanced to meet him in a company of tourists at Durham Castle.  Though I was a devotee of the Biglow Papers, I did not know their distinguished author even by sight; and I was intensely amused by the air of easy mastery, the calm and almost fatherly patronage, with which this cultivated American overrode the indignant showwoman; pointed out, for the general benefit of the admiring tourists, the gaps and lapses in her artistic, architectural, and archaeological knowledge; and made mullion and portcullis, and armour and tapestry the pegs for a series of neat discourses on mediaeval history, domestic decoration, and the science of fortification.

Which things are an allegory.  We, as a nation, take this calm assurance of foreigners at its own valuation.  We consent to be told that we do not know our own poets, cannot pronounce our own language, and have no well-educated women.  But after a time this process palls.  We question the divine right of the superiority thus imposed on us.  We ask on what foundation these high claims rest, and we discover all at once that we have paid a great deal of deference where very little was deserved.  By processes such as these I came to find, in years long subsequent to the encounter at Durham, that Mr. Lowell, though an accomplished politician, a brilliant writer, and an admirable after-dinner speaker, was, conversationally considered, an inaccurate man with an accurate manner.  But, after all, inaccuracy is by no means the worst of conversational faults, and when he was in the vein Mr. Lowell could be exceedingly good company.  He liked talking, and talked not only much but very well.  He had a genuine vein of wit and great dexterity in phrase-making; and on due occasion would produce from the rich stores of his own experience some of the most vivid and striking incidents, both civil and military, of that tremendous struggle for human freedom with which his name and fame must be always and most honourably associated.

FOOTNOTES: 

[15] April 15 1888

[16] Written in 1897.

XIV.

CONVERSATION—­continued.