something of the people satirized in it. The reputed comic poet of the
country at present is OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, a physician. Whether
it was owing to the disappointment caused by hearing too much in his
praise beforehand we will not pretend to say, but it certainly did
seem to us that Dr. Holmes' efforts in this line must originally
have been intended to act upon his patients emetically. After a
conscientious perusal of the doctor, the most readable, and about the
only presentable thing we can find in him, is the bit of seriocomic
entitled _The Last Leaf_.

"But within the last three years there has arisen in the United States
a satirist of genuine excellence, who, however, besides being but
moderately appreciated by his countrymen, seems himself in a great
measure to have mistaken his real forte. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, one of
the Boston coterie, has for some time been publishing verses, which
are by the coterie duly glorified, but which are in no respect
distinguishable from the ordinary level of American poetry, except
that they combine an extraordinary pretension to originality, with a
more than usually palpable imitation of English models. Indeed, the
failure was so manifest, that the American literati seem, in this
one case, to have rebelled against Boston dictation, and there is
sufficient internal evidence that such of them as do duty for critics
handled Mr. Lowell pretty severely. Violently piqued at this, and
simultaneously conceiving a disgust for the Mexican war, he was
impelled by both feelings to take the field as a satirist: to the
former we owe the _Fable for Critics_; to the latter, the _Biglow
Papers_. It was a happy move, for he has the rare faculty of writing
_clever doggerel_. Take out the best of _Ingoldsby_, Campbell's rare
piece of fun _The Friars of Dijon_, and perhaps a little of Walsh's
_Aristophanes_, and there is no contemporary verse of the class with