sense of intimacy, or what the Autocrat would call "the
cumulative humanities. "

Young Holmes became the pet and the glory of his class of 1829 at
Harvard. It was only in 1838 that their reunions began, but
thereafter they held fifty-six meetings, of which Holmes attended
fifty and wrote poems for forty-three. Many of "the Boys" whom he
celebrated became famous in their own right, but they remain "the
Boys" to all lovers of Holmes's verses. His own career as a poet
had begun during his single year in the Law School. His later
years brought him some additional skill in polishing his lines
and a riper human wisdom, but his native verse-making talent is
as completely revealed in "Old Ironsides," published when he was
twenty-one, and in "The Last Leaf," composed a year or two later,
as in anything he was to write during the next half-century. In
many respects he was a curious survival of the cumulative
humanities of the eighteenth century. He might have been, like
good Dr. Arbuthnot, an ornament of the Augustan age. He shared
with the English Augustans a liking for the rhymed couplet, an
instinctive social sense, a feeling for the presence of an
imaginary audience of congenial listeners. One still catches the
"Hear! Hear!" between his clever lines. In many of the traits of
his mind this "Yankee Frenchman" resembled such a typical
eighteenth century figure as Voltaire. Like Voltaire, he was
tolerant--except toward Calvinism and Homeopathy. In some of the
tricks of his prose style he is like a kindlier Sterne. His knack
for vers de societe was caught from Horace, but he would not have
been a child of his own age without the additional gift of
rhetoric and eloquence which is to be seen in his patriotic poems
and his hymns. For Holmes possessed, in spite of all his