Among My Books

New York : E. J. Hale and Son. 1871.

IT is not among Mr. Lowell’s books this time, nor is it Mr. Lowell who writes, as a very careless reader might discover before reading far into the volume. “These essays were meant to be purely fugitive” (the author thinks this conceivable), and first printed in the New York World, the editor of which is thanked for encouraging the author to write them. “ They have accidentally the same title as one of Mr. Lowell’s productions ; but while his volume relates only to three or four books or writers, these memories float round and grasp, in perhaps a feeble way, many more,” which the author apparently imagines is an excuse for his appropriation of the name.

As to the matter of the book, it grasps without doubt feebly such topics as Swift, Bolingbroke, Junius, Thackeray, Scott, Palmerston, The Prayer-Book, The Theatre, etc. The author is a reader, and in some senses an appreciator of books; but he is hopelessly common in his tastes, with a vein of wrong-headed sentimentality running through all. We shall best describe him by quoting, as his notion of “powerful wordpainting,” a passage of Henry Kingsley’s swollen and high-stepping twaddle about Thackeray’s death : “ ‘ And so the news will travel southward. Some lithe, clear-eyed lad will sneak, run swiftly, pause to listen, and then hold steadily forward across the desolate, war - wasted space between the Federal lines and the smouldering watchfires of the Confederates, carrying the news brought by the last mail from Europe, and will come to a knot of calm, clear-eyed, lean-faced Confederate officers (oh ! that such men should be wasted in such a quarrel, for the quarrel was not theirs, after all); and one of these men will run his eye over the telegram and say to the others, “ Poor Thackeray is dead. ” And the news will go from picket to picket along the limestone ridges which hang above the once happy valleys of Virginia, and will pass south until Jefferson Davis — the man so like Stratford de Redcliffe, the man of the penetrating eyes, and of the thin, close-set lips, the man with the weight of an empire on his shoulders — will look up from his papers and say, with heartfelt sorrow, “ The author of ‘ The Virginians ’ is dead.” ’ ”