himself is still contagious. To pronounce the words Doctor Holmes
in any company of intelligent Americans is the prologue to a
smile of recognition, comprehension, sympathy. The word Goldsmith
has now lost, alas, this provocative quality; the word Stevenson
still possesses it. The little Doctor, who died in the same year
as Stevenson, belonged like him to the genial race of friends of
mankind, and a few of his poems, and some gay warm-hearted pages
of his prose, will long preserve his memory. But the Boston which
he loved has vanished as utterly as Sam Johnson's London.

James Russell Lowell was ten years younger than Holmes, and
though he died three years before the Doctor, he seems, for other
reasons than those of chronology, to belong more nearly to the
present. Although by birth as much of a New England Brahmin as
Holmes, and in his later years as much of a Boston and Cambridge
idol, he nevertheless touched our universal American life on many
sides, represented us worthily in foreign diplomacy, argued the
case of Democracy with convincing power, and embodied, as more
perfect artists like Hawthorne and Longfellow could never have
done, the subtleties and potencies of the national temperament.
He deserves and reveals the closest scrutiny, but his personality
is difficult to put on paper. Horace Scudder wrote his biography
with careful competence, and Ferris Greenslet has made him the
subject of a brilliant critical study. Yet readers differ widely
in their assessment of the value of his prose and verse, and in
their understanding of his personality.

The external facts of his career are easy to trace and must be
set down here with brevity. A minister's son, and descended from
a very old and distinguished family, he was born at Elmwood in