Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809- ) is a native of Cambridge and a graduate
of Harvard in the class of '29; a class whose anniversary reunions he
has celebrated in something like forty distinct poems and songs. For
sheer cleverness and versatility Dr. Holmes is, perhaps, unrivaled
among American men of letters. He has been poet, wit, humorist,
novelist, essayist, and a college lecturer and writer on medical
topics. In all of these departments he has produced work which ranks
high, if not with the highest. His father, Dr. Abiel Holmes, was a
graduate of Yale and an orthodox minister of liberal temper, but the
son early threw in his lot with the Unitarians; and, as was natural to
a man of satiric turn and with a very human enjoyment of a fight, whose
youth was cast in an age of theological controversy, he has always had
his fling at Calvinism, and has prolonged the slogans of old battles
into a later generation; sometimes, perhaps, insisting upon them rather
wearisomely and beyond the limits of good taste. He had, even as an
undergraduate, a reputation for cleverness at writing comic verses, and
many of his good things in this kind, such as the _Dorchester Giant_
and the _Height of the Ridiculous_, were contributed to the
_Collegian_, a students' paper. But he first drew the attention of a
wider public by his spirited ballad of _Old Ironsides_--

"Ay! Tear her tattered ensign down!"--

composed about 1830, when it was proposed by the government to take to
pieces the unseaworthy hulk of the famous old man-of-war,
_Constitution_. Holmes's indignant protest--which has been a favorite
subject for school-boy declamation--had the effect of postponing the
vessel's fate for a great many years. From 1830-35 the young poet was
pursuing his medical studies in Boston and Paris, contributing now and