"Lowell's "Battle of the Kettle and Pot

W5, rHEN LOWELL collected his pieces for the Biglow Papers: Second Series, published in October, i866, dated I867, he included two which had not before appeared in print, Numbers VIII and IX. Number VIII is Kettelopotomachia, a mock-heroic poem in macaronic Latin hexameters. The purpose of the following pages is to offer a translation, with scholia, of this piece.' It is an item of some interest both because it is the only considerable bit of Latin or Latinized poetry which Lowell wrote and because it offers evidence of Lowell's attitude toward the South, its people and traditions, many months after the close of the Civil War. As such it is a valuable commentary on the series of essays on the problem of reconstruction which Lowell wrote during I865-66 for the North American Review.2 Apparently Lowell did not at first think of Kettelopotomachia as a member of the Biglow series. At any rate, during its composition he offered it, not to the Atlantic, where the other members of the Second Series appeared, but to a new periodical, the Nation, then in its second volume, of which his friend E. L. Godkin was editor. On January io, i866, he wrote to Godkin

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