Mr. Slattery of Boston.

It was our singularly happy fortune to meet with a number of distinguished Massachusetts gentlemen last week. Professional duties constantly bring us into association with people from all over the country, but never before the felicitous occasion to which we now refer had we been accorded the inestimable boon of meeting and conversing with leading representatives of the intelligence and the culture of the grand old Bay State. It appears that these gentlemen whom we met last week, came all the way from Massachusetts to investigate the drainage of that beautiful suburban monarchy conducted by our esteemed fellow-townsman, George M. Pullman. They were members of the Massachusetts Legislature, and had been authorized as a committee to visit Chicago with a view to learning a few facts about the system of drainage in vogue hereabout. As soon as it became known that they had arrived in the midst of us, our hospitable citizens bestirred themselves to contribute to the entertainment of the distinguished delegation. It is to Dr. DeWolf, our popular city physician, that we are indebted for the honor of becoming acquainted with the Massachusetts embassy. Dr. DeWolf gave the distinguished party a formal dinner at the Grand Pacific Hotel last Saturday afternoon, and (as one of the local guests invited to bask in the sunlight of 215the Massachusetts statesmen’s smiles, and to quaff the nectar of the Massachusett’s statesmen’s wit, sentiment, and logic) it became our ever-to-be-remembered but melancholy fortune to sit at table next to the Hon. E. J. Slattery of Framingham, Mass. Certain facial contours, features, and expressions of this honorable person—to say nothing of his habit of eating with his knife—aroused a suspicion that we had met Mr. Slattery before (and it was around the Chicago polls, we thought), but we have since then concluded that it was not Mr. Slattery, but several persons who looked like him that we had met. The New-England vernacular, as spoken by Mr. Slattery, was different from what we had expected to hear. There was a richness and a furriness about it that reminded us of red flannel a yard wide and an inch thick; and what excited our surprise (if not admiration) was the discovery that, although Mr. Slattery had come all the way from Massachusetts to investigate Illinois drainage, Mr. Slattery seemed to care little, and to know less, about that exceedingly useful and interesting system. To be more explicit, Mr. Slattery appeared to be disinclined to converse on the drainage subject, and to be inclined to discuss the wrongs of Erin, and the subversion of Queen Victoria’s iron heel. From this representative Massachusetts gentleman’s remarks, which were too forcible for publication in our conservative columns, we gathered in our feeble way that the 216Commonwealth of Massachusetts was on the threshold of a war with England—that it required but the firebrand of Mr. Slattery’s eloquence to kindle the flame which was to raze the throne of the haughty Guelphs to its nethermost underpinning. Still, this matter did not particularly interest us; and taking advantage of the lull in the conversation, occasioned by Mr. Slattery’s exploiting with his jack-knife in his mouth, we adroitly changed the drift of the discourse by observing, that, of all the distinguished living sons of Massachusetts we most desired to meet, the one particular distinguished son was the Hon. James Russell Lowell, whereupon Mr. Slattery shocked us greatly by saying that Mr. Lowell was not “worth a ——!” We replied deferentially, that we had always had a faint but lingering impression that Mr. Lowell was revered and beloved by the people of Massachusetts; but Mr. Slattery corrected that impression by saying that Mr. Lowell couldn’t be elected road-overseer in his (Slattery’s) district. Mr. Slattery said that Mr. Lowell had never done any thing but sit around all his life, and write poetry—very bad poetry, too—poetry that couldn’t hold a candle to Thomas Moore’s songs. Furthermore, Mr. Slattery said, that, although he had lived in Massachusetts a good many years, he had never read a line of Mr. Lowell’s poetry, and, what was worse, he never would. Another member of the Massachusetts Legislature said that he had come to 217this country from Holland twenty years ago; that he had never read Mr. Lowell’s poetry; that he had no use for Lowell, anyway. With that, Mr. Slattery and his colleague fell to denouncing Mr. Lowell so roundly, that, in our confusion, we protested that we didn’t refer to the man Lowell, but to the town Lowell, where they make shoes by the cord.

The result of our meeting these eminent Massachusetts representatives, who are presumed to reflect the sentiments of their communities, was a solemn conviction that we had overestimated the worth of quite a number of New-England people—men who perhaps were good enough and bright enough in their day, but who had faded into insignificance beneath the scrutiny of these later times. When we heard Mrs. Stowe stigmatized as “a crank who wrote a book about a naygur,” and old Dr. Holmes described as “one of them Harvard professors who never threw an honest shovelful of dirt,”—when we heard these things, we felt that we were indeed the victim of a misplaced confidence. But, even feeling so, we could not help regretting having learned the truth; and much as we revere the wit, the learning, and the culture of Mr. Slattery, and of Mr. Slattery’s colleague from Amsterdam, we would fain protest against the habit into which Massachusetts appears to be drifting; namely, that of sending out broadcast these bold and unanswerable iconoclasts, whose delight is in the demolition of our popular idols.

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