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[46] little profit to their authors, brought sometimes disaster. Bowen, for instance, whose self-willed and somewhat disputative temperament made him many enemies, lost the Professorship of American History in Harvard University through a series of attacks on the Hungarian revolutionists for whom Kossuth had aroused much interest in this country. Bowen's views were strongly contested by a man of uncommon ability, Robert Carter, also of Cambridge, who wrote a series of papers in the Boston Atlas (1850) in defence of Kossuth and his party; and these papers, being reprinted in a pamphlet, were said to have caused the refusal of the Board of Overseers to confirm Bowen's nomination as Professor of History. Three years later, however, he was appointed Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity, a position which he held until his death. He was a man of immense reading, keen mind, and was not without those qualities which Lord Byron thought essential to an historian,--wrath and partiality. For him alone Lowell made an essential change in his “Fable for critics,” leaving out in the revised
Macmillan, 1900.
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