[110]
him a vacation, and at the end of the second year Hayes promoted him to the Court of St. James.
Such an appointment would have been dangerous enough in 1861, but at the time it was made the relations between the United States and Great Britain were sufficiently peaceable to warrant it. Lowell represented his country in a highly creditable manner.
The only difficulty he experienced was with the Fenian agitation, and he managed that with such diplomatic tact that no one has yet been able to discover whether he was in favor of home rule for Ireland or not.
He made a number of excellent addresses in England, besides a multitude of after-dinner speeches.
Perhaps the best of them was his address at the Coleridge celebration, in which he levelled an attack on the English canonization of what they call “common sense,” but which is really a new name for dogmatism.
Lowell, if not a transcendentalist, was always an idealist, and he knew that ideality was as necessary to Cromwell and Canning as it was to Shakespeare and Scott.
He was certainly more popular in England than he had ever been in America, and he openly admitted that he disliked to resign his position.
Professor Child said, in 1882: “Lowell's conversation is witty, with a basis of literary ”
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.