small, but these were of her first citizens, and their primacy, in its
way, was of the same quality as that, say, of the chief families of
Venice. But these names can never have the effect for the stranger that
they had for one to the manner born. I say had, for I doubt whether in
Boston they still mean all that they once meant, and that their
equivalents meant in science, in law, in politics. The most famous, if
not the greatest of all the literary men of Boston, I have not mentioned
with them, for Longfellow was not of the place, though by his sympathies
and relations he became of it; and I have not mentioned Oliver Wendell
Holmes, because I think his name would come first into the reader's
thought with the suggestion of social quality in the humanities.

Holmes was of the Brahminical caste which his humorous recognition
invited from its subjectivity in the New England consciousness into the
light where all could know it and own it, and like Longfellow he was
allied to the patriciate of Boston by the most intimate ties of life. For
a long time, for the whole first period of his work, he stood for that
alone, its tastes, its prejudices, its foibles even, and when he came to
stand in his 'second period, for vastly, for infinitely more, and to make
friends with the whole race, as few men have ever done, it was always, I
think, with a secret shiver of doubt, a backward look of longing, and an
eye askance. He was himself perfectly aware of this at times, and would
mark his several misgivings with a humorous sense of the situation. He
was essentially too kind to be of a narrow world, too human to be finally
of less than humanity, too gentle to be of the finest gentility. But
such limitations as he had were in the direction I have hinted, or
perhaps more than hinted; and I am by no means ready to make a mock of
them, as it would be so easy to do for some reasons that he has himself
suggested. To value aright the affection which the old Bostonian had for
Boston one must conceive of something like the patriotism of men in the