...e gave to the short story its vogue in America. Like his poems, his tales are notably unequal. Some of his earlier efforts—especially his satirical and humorous extravaganzas, as and Bon- Bon —are properly to be characterized as rubbish; and he was capable in his later years of descending to such inferior work as , , and X-ing a Paragrab. One feels, indeed, that Lowell's famous chara...