Note 74 — Chapter V · A FABLE FOR CRITICS, THE BIGLOW PAPERS, AND THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL 1847-1848

Morse’s Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes, ii. 107. In an unfinished letter to Dr. Holmes written from Madrid in 1878, Lowell refers to a recent criticism of Holmes’s poems, in which the characterization in the Fable was quoted. “I thought the young fellow who wrote it had some sense, especially as he quoted something I said of you in my impudence thirty years ago. It is an awful thought, but these who then were passing out of the baldness of infancy are now entering upon that of middle age, and here we both are as if nothing had happened. And probably precious little has happened,—I mean of any great account. The more one reads of history the more one sees mankind doing the same foolish things over again with admirable gravity and then contemplating themselves with the satisfaction of Jack Horner. I remember when I was writing the Fable for Critics and used to walk up and down the front walk at Elmwood, I paused to watch the ant-hills, and in the seemingly aimless and yet ceaseless activity of their citizens thought I saw a very close paraphrase of the life of men.”