best Spanish men of the time. In England he was at once a most welcome
guest, and was in great demand as a public speaker. No one can read
his dispatches from Madrid and London without being struck by his
sagacity, his readiness in emergencies, his interest in and quick
perception of the political situation in the country where he was
resident, and his unerring knowledge as a man of the world. Above all,
he was through and through an American, true to the principles which
underlie American institutions. His address on _Democracy_, which he
delivered in England, is one of the great statements of human liberty.
A few years later, after his return to America, he gave another
address to his own countrymen on _The Place of the Independent in
Politics_. It was a noble defense of his own position, not without a
trace of discouragement at the apparently sluggish movement in
American self-government of recent years, but with that faith in the
substance of his countrymen which gave him the right to use words of
honest warning.

The public life of Mr. Lowell made him more of a figure before the
world. He received honors from societies and universities; he was
decorated by the highest honors which Harvard could pay officially;
and Oxford and Cambridge, St. Andrews and Edinburgh and Bologna, gave
gowns. He established warm personal relations with Englishmen, and,
after his release from public office, he made several visits to
England. There, too, was buried his wife, who died in 1885. The
closing years of his life in his own country, though touched with
domestic loneliness and diminished by growing physical infirmities
that predicted his death, were rich also with the continued expression
of his large personality. He delivered the public address in
commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of Harvard
University; he gave a course of lectures on the Old English Dramatists