Curiously enough, the author of these lines lived to write an
appreciative life of the poet who wrote the _Sphinx_. There was a good
deal of toryism or social conservatism in Holmes. He acknowledged a
preference for the man with a pedigree, the man who owned family
portraits, had been brought up in familiarity with books, and could
pronounce "view" correctly. Readers unhappily not of the "Brahmin
caste of New England" have sometimes resented as snobbishness Holmes's
harping on "family," and his perpetual application of certain favorite
shibboleths to other people's ways of speech. "The woman who
calc'lates is lost."

"Learning condemns beyond the reach of hope
The careless lips that speak of soap for soap. . . .
Do put your accents in the proper spot:
Don't, let me beg you, don't say 'How?' for 'What?'
The things named 'pants' in certain documents,
A word not made for gentlemen, but 'gents.'"

With the rest of "society" he was disposed to ridicule the abolition
movement as a crotchet of the eccentric and the long-haired. But when
the civil war broke out he lent his pen, his tongue, and his own flesh
and blood to the cause of the Union. The individuality of Holmes's
writings comes in part from their local and provincial bias. He has
been the laureate of Harvard College and the bard of Boston city, an
urban poet, with a cockneyish fondness for old Boston ways and
things--the Common and the Frog Pond, Faneuil Hall and King's Chapel
and the Old South, Bunker Hill, Long Wharf, the Tea Party, and the town
crier. It was Holmes who invented the playful saying that "Boston
Statehouse is the hub of the solar system."