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their daily life is well portrayed in the following extracts from a sort of diary communicated by
Lowell about the year 1849 to his friend,
Charles F. Briggs, of New York, who then edited
Holden's Magazine. By a letter from
Briggs to
R. W. Griswold1 it would appear that he was in charge of it in January, 1850, which must have been about the time of this letter.
There is not, I think, in all
Mr. Norton's delightful collection of
Lowell's correspondence anything quite so thoroughly local, or giving so close a glimpse of “Old Cambridge.”
The editor's preface is as follows:--
A Pepysian letter.
Just as we had taken up our pen to go on with our topics, we received a letter from a Down East correspondent, so full of Pepysian anecdote, provincial gossip, and humane satire, that we cannot resist the temptation to overstep all the bounds of delicacy and give it to the world entire.
Why should we selfishly wrap in our napkin such a piece of enjoyable good nature as this?
By the way, we might as well give warning to our several
