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[180] should like to have your article. I think that folks have confounded (as they commonly do) force with power in estimating him and so have overrated him.

Cordially yours, J. R. L.

Cambridge, August 27, 1860.
My dear Higginson,
Your article on Parker is by this time in type for the October number. I should have printed it before had I known that it was in my possession. As ill-luck would have it, it was the bottom one of a bundle of Mss. which I was working down through with no notion that it contained anything but anonymous matter. I wondered you had not sent it, . . .

I like your Parker very much — though I question the epithet “noble frankness” which you apply to his treatment of the dead — who couldn't answer. But I think you have treated the subject with great judgment and discretion. Your twenty languages is a good many.

Cordially yours, J. R. Lowell.

It is a curious fact that while the delineation of Parker in the “Fable for critics” is perhaps the best ever given, yet he and Lowell never quite sympathized. What I called “noble” frankness in Parker's series of obituary sermons, was based upon the general habit which had prevailed up to that time of making such things absolutely colorless except for flattery; so that Parker's fine address on John Quincy

Macmillan, 1900.

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