Two Aristocrats

...With skill, sympathy, and wit, Duberman goes on to tell of the Atlantic Monthly, which Lowell edited in its first years, of the Civil War, in which Lowell lost three of his nephews, of Lowell's second marriage, which ended tragically, of the scholarly years at Harvard, and of the tours of duty as ambassador to Spain and to England...

...But he does not seem to realize that a speech on the foolishness of Mrs...

...In my opinion mid-Nineteenth Century New England had more than its share of them and our own day somewhat less...

...Three of Lowell's four children died in infancy or childhood...

...Perhaps some listeners get Buckley wrong because they listen to his tone and suspect that he is not always the friend of freedom he claims to be...

...His account of his adventure in practical politics is curious...

...The difficulty with the book is that a third purpose overshadows the first two: Buckley seems most of all to want to show how unfair everyone was to William F. Buckley...

...At a time when Lowell, newly married, had to struggle to support himself, he contributed poems and essays to relatively obscure and unpopular anti-slavery journals like the Pennsylvania Freeman and the National Antislavery Standard...

...Buckley wants to call attention to the almost unimaginable problems of New York and to suggest solutions to these problems (e.g., relocate welfare recipients in "great and humane rehabilitation centers...

...He proves to my satisfaction that his speech to the Holy Name Society's Communion for policemen was distorted by the press and sanctimoniously attacked by men ignorant of what he said...

...Of our own day, more in a moment...

...The years of involvement in radicalism were also years of happy domesticity followed by domestic tragedy...

...In a period when historians win prizes for psychological probes of "fanaticism," one is grateful for Duberman's study of Lowell, a moderate Garrisonian, a radical believer in immediate emancipation who nonetheless tolerated men who believed in gradualism and in political rather than moral pressure...

...He finds them guilty of misrepresentation, malice, and the misuse of English...

...He scrutinizes the utterances of his opponents, John Lindsay and Abraham Beame, as if these men were contributors to the American Historical Review and as if he himself were the very embodiment of explication de texte...

...Buckley's self-righteous disclaimers and his insistence on scrupulous accuracy are vitiated by his own gleeful rhetoric: "Lindsay's home district is probably the most fabled in the United States...

...Among the most important of Lowell's roles was that of abolitionist...

...The Unmaking of a Mayor has several purposes...

...who insist, despite the demands of personal ambition, on fulfilling public obligations...

...like the nearly-drowned boy who never after goes near the water, Lowell continued to keep up his guard against the free play of feeling, to avoid the sensory edge...

...Although Lowell's accomplishments as poet, editor, critic, professor, and diplomat were considerable, Duberman insists that Lowell was great for what he was rather than for what he did...

...Viola Liuzzo might have deplorable connotations among an audience of policemen hard-pressed by racial tensions...

...who are willing to jeopardize their private advantage for the sake of a principle—such men are always in scarce supply...

...What were the deeds which we are asked by Duberman to admire...

...who combine conviction with tolerance, holding themselves to strict standards while managing compassion for other men's foibles...

...The colleague complied, and then queried, "Why Lowell...

...Like Charles Francis Adams, whom Duberman portrayed in a book that won the Bancroft Prize, Lowell was a man of character: "Men like Lowell, who have a realistic sense of their own worth—and that of others...

...Until he decided to run for mayor of New York on the Conservative ticket, he was best known as editor of National Review...

...If Buckley is the modern aristocrat, and his hauteur suggests that he is, then there is all the more reason to ponder James Russell Lowell, and to reflect on Duberman's unhappy assertion that men like Lowell are in short supply today...

...It shelters not only just about all the resident financial, social, and artistic elite of New York but also probably the densest national concentration of vegetarians, pacifists, hermaphrodites, junkies, Communists, Ran-dites, clam-juice-and-betel-nut eaters, plus a sprinkling of quite normal people...

...There was a price to be paid for mastery over his emotions: "To some extent the safeguards became habitual...

...About William F. Buckley there is no likelihood of a consensus...

...Henry Tho-reau's refusal to pay taxes for a war to extend slavery is now the better known protest, but Lowell's poems did much more to rouse contemporary opinion than Thoreau's solitary act of civil disobedience...

...After his first book, God and Man at Yale, in which he demonstrated that the faculty of Yale accepts the divine inspiration of neither Holy Writ nor The Wealth of Nations, he settled into his present role as aristocratic gadfly of the so-called Liberal Establishment...

...who are capable of enjoyment, though sensible enough not to expect it...

...His wife, whom he worshipped as an angelic spirit, outlived her only son by sixteen months...

...During the years when he shared the editorial burdens of the latter magazine, he published in it his finest and most characteristic poems including The Biglow Papers, his comic satire, in New England dialect, against the Mexican War...

...Few readers of this almost impeccable book are likely to quibble with its author's high estimate of Lowell's character...

...Duber-man's answer, in the form of a four-page introduction, is the most eloquent part of a book remarkable for its sustained eloquence...

...Using diaries and other unpublished materials, Duberman shows how deeply Lowell grieved, how bravely he disguised his grief...

...Buckley attacks statements made by his detractors...