THE

BIGLOW PAPERS.

BY

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

Newly Edited,

WITH A PREFACE

BY THE

AUTHOR OF "TOM BROWN'S SCHOOL-DAYS."

THIRD ENGLISH EDITION.

Reprinted, with the Author's Sanction, from the
Last American Edition.

LONDON:
TRÜBNER & CO. 60, PATERNOSTER ROW.
1861.

PUBLISHERS' PREFACE.

In order to avoid any misconception, the Publishers think it advisable to announce that the present Edition of the "Biglow Papers" is issued with the express sanction of the Author, granted by letter, from which the following is an extract:—

ENGLISH EDITOR'S PREFACE.

I can safely say that few things in my life have pleased me more than the request of Messrs. Trübner, backed by the expressed wish of the author, that I would see the first English edition of the "Biglow Papers" through the press. I fell in with the Papers about ten years ago, soon after their publication; and the impression they then made on me has been deepening and becoming more lively ever since. In fact, I do not think that, even in his own New England, Mr. Lowell can have a more constant or more grateful reader, though I cannot say that I go much beyond most of my own intimate friends over here in my love for his works. I may remark, in passing, that the impossibility of keeping a copy of the "Biglow Papers" for more than a few weeks (of which many of us have had repeated and sorrowful proof[1]) shows how much an English Edition is needed.

Perhaps, strictly speaking, I should say a reprint, and not an edition. In fact, I am not clear (in spite of the wishes of author and publishers) that I have any right to call myself editor, for the book is as thoroughly edited already as a book need be. What between dear old Parson Wilbur—with his little vanities and pedantries, his "infinite faculty of sermonizing," his simplicity and humour, and his deep and righteous views of life, and power of hard hitting when he has anything to say which needs driving home—and Father Ezekiel, "the brown parchment-hided old man of the geoponic or bucolic species," "76 year old cum next tater diggin, and thair aint nowheres a kitting" (we readily believe) "spryer 'n he be;" and that judicious and lazy sub-editor, "Columbus Nye, pastor of a church in Bungtown Corner," whose acquaintance we make so thoroughly in the ten lines which he contributes—whatever of setting or framing was needed, or indeed possible, for the nine gems in verse of Mr. Hosea Biglow, has been so well done already in America by the hand best fitted for the task, that he must be a bold man who would meddle with the book now in the editing way. Even the humble satisfaction of adding a glossary and index has been denied to me, as there are already very good ones. I have merely added some half-dozen words to the glossary, at which I thought that English readers might perhaps stumble. When the proposal was first made to me, indeed, I thought of trying my hand at a sketch of American politics of thirteen years ago, the date of the Mexican war and of the first appearance of the "Biglow Papers." But I soon found out, first, that I was not, and had no ready means of making myself, competent for such a task; secondly, that the book did not need it. The very slight knowledge which every educated Englishman has of Transatlantic politics will be quite enough to make him enjoy the racy smack of the American soil, which is one of their great charms; and, as to the particular characters, they are most truly citizens of the world as well as Americans. If an Englishman cannot find 'Bird-o'-freedom Sawins,' 'John P. Robinson's,' 'pious editors,' and candidates "facin' south-by-north" at home—ay, and if he is not conscious of his own individual propensity to the meannesses and duplicities of such, which come under the lash of Hosea—he knows little of the land we live in, or of his own heart, and is not worthy to read the "Biglow Papers."

Instead, therefore, of any attempt of my own, I will give Mr. Lowell's own account of how and why he came to write this book. "All I can say is," he writes, "the book was thar. How it came is more than I can tell. I cannot, like the great Göthe, deliberately imagine what would have been a proper 'Entstehungsweise' for my book, and then assume it as fact. I only know that I believed our war with Mexico (though we had as just ground for it as a strong nation ever had against a weak one) to be essentially a war of false pretences, and that it would result in widening the boundaries, and so prolonging the life of slavery. Believing that it is the manifest destiny of the English race to occupy this whole continent, and to display there that practical understanding in matters of government and colonization which no other race has given such proofs of possessing since the Romans, I hated to see a noble hope evaporated into a lying phrase to sweeten the foul breath of demagogues. Leaving the sin of it to God, I believed, and still believe, that slavery is the Achilles-heel of our own polity, that it is a temporary and false supremacy of the white races, sure to destroy that supremacy at last, because an enslaved people always prove themselves of more enduring fibre than their enslavers, as not suffering from the social vices sure to be engendered by oppression in the governing class. Against these and many other things I thought all honest men should protest. I was born and bred in the country, and the dialect was homely to me. I tried my first Biglow paper in a newspaper, and found that it had a great run. So I wrote the others from time to time during the year which followed, always very rapidly, and sometimes (as with 'What Mr. Robinson thinks') at one sitting. When I came to collect them and publish them in a volume, I conceived my parson-editor, with his pedantry and verbosity, his amiable vanity and superiority to the verses he was editing, as a fitting artistic background and foil. He gave me the chance, too, of glancing obliquely at many things which