the range of his activities too wide, poetry and humor, scholarship, philosophy and zest in public affairs were too intricately mingled in his life, to let him be seen clearly and seen whole by a contemporary biographer; and those serve him best, perhaps, who are satisfied with gathering together biographical material which in time will certainly be moulded by an efficient hand.

With this in mind, Dr. Hale has drawn upon his large fund of reminiscences to recall the circumstances of that narrow world in which Lowell's character matured, and connect them with the course he kept through the much larger world of his later interests.

By the nature of many of these reminiscences we are reminded of the speed with which the "undelayable year" rolls round. When Lowell, a boy of fifteen, entered Harvard College his Alma Mater was little better than "a somewhat enlarged country academy," with the distinction that" you studied your lesson in your room and recited it in another building." Chapel exercises followed the sun, occurring at six in the morning and six at night during the long days, and ranging to half-past seven in the morning and a quarter past four in the afternoon as the days grew shorter, "that the chapel need not be artificially lighted." Breakfast and supper hours were regulated by the hours for prayers, and, in consequence, the students had "enormously long evenings for winter reading." The books taken out of the library were "not books of science, nor history, nor sociology, nor politics; they were books of literature," as "literature" was emphatically the fashion of the day. A queer little volume of Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, published in Philadelphia, was seen "pretty much everywhere," and Tennyson's 1830 volume

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL AND HIS FRIENDS. By Edward Everett Hale. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 8vo, $3.00.

was known in Emerson's copy which somebody borrowed in Cambridge, and which was "passed reverently from hand to hand." "It is always pleasant to me. to remember," Dr. Hale declares, "that those first poems of his were handed about in manuscript as a new ode of Horace might have been handed round among the young gentlemen of Rome."

The fact that Lowell was 66 rusticated " at Harvard is attributed by Professor Norton to his negligence of the set lesson, for which he often substituted "something of more worth intrinsically and for himself." Dr. Hale attributes it to the fact that he would not go to morning prayers. Once a week he would "screw himself up to go" as if to propitiate the Faculty who met on Monday night, but obedience one day out of the seven proved insufficient.

Whatever the whole cause of the rustication was, it certainly was not any mysterious offence, gossipy rumors of which have reached Dr. Hale's ears to meet with his emphatic denial. The charge of "gross intemperance" he repudiates with special scorn, declaring that he never saw Lowell "from his birth to his death" under any influence of liquor which could be detected in any way." It will be remembered that in the Letters Lowell calls his gout the "unearned increment" of his grandfather's Madeira.

In the light of Boston's present reputation it is interesting to read of the origin of "The Boston Miscellany of Literature and Fashion," to which Lowell sent his post-graduate compositions; and which is now so much sought for by collectors. Its publishers saw no future for a "purely literary" magazine, and included in each number two pages of fashion with a fashion-plate to float the other forty-six pages of text by Hawthorne and Lowell, Dr. Hale himself, and others with names nearly as potent. Dr. Hale's brother, Nathan Hale, was the literary editor, and

his department was quite distinct from the fashion pages, as he was obliged carefully to explain to Mrs. Stowe, who declined to contribute because she had been "shocked by a décolleté figure" on one of the plates.

Those were days when young writers were not encouraged in Boston as they have been in later years. The old firms of book publishers were chiefly importers and "regarded an author with a manuscript much as a dealer in Russian sail

cloth might regard a lady who should come into his counting-room and ask him to make her a linen handkerchief," while for magazine articles a dollar a page was exceptionally high pay. When Lowell became editor of the Atlantic he was discriminatingly cordial to authors who were still on the threshold, and a pleasant story is told of a joke between him and Mr. Aldrich.

"When Aldrich, somewhat timidly, sent his first poem to the Atlantic, Lowell

at once recognized its worth, and sent to him the most cordial thanks. Many years after Aldrich found himself in turn editor of the Atlantic. Lowell, then at the height of his reputation, sent a poem to the magazine. Aldrich had the fun of copying, in acknowledging the manuscript, the very note which Lowell wrote to him most kindly twenty years before, in which he recognized the value of his first contribution. Lowell came round to the office at once and told Aldrich that he

had almost determined him to adopt a literary career."

That part of Dr. Hale's book which has to do with the latter part of Lowell's life naturally lacks the personal flavor of the earlier pages, but the engaging way in which comment, quotation, and anecdote are mingled gives a very vital if not a very consecutive impression. We see Lowell the man on the crest of his eager individuality, interrupting his work as diplomatist to send some tobacco to a