The binding of this volume is considerably too valuable for the Contents.


Photograph

Gift of W. A. White, 1918 – AL 2395.395*PF
If I had but some letters of hers, now, to turn over,
I might turn for the nonce a Byronic philosopher,
And bewitch all the flats by mourning the loss of her.

James Russell Lowell (1819-1891). A Fable for Critics: proof pages 76-78, corrected by the author (New York, 1848).

Byron’s satirical heir in the United States was the poet-scholar James Russell Lowell, whose A Fable for Critics surveys the American literary landscape at mid-century. Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, and Poe are just a few of the authors subjected to his good-natured raillery. In belittling the tribe of critics, he invokes the name of Byron’s erstwhile adversary and Scottish judge, Francis Jeffrey: “Thus a lawyer’s apprentice, just out of his teens, / Will do for the Jeffrey of six magazines.”