d John, the Divinity Student, the
Kohinoor, the Sculpin, the Scarabaeus and the Old Gentleman who sits
opposite, are not fully drawn characters, but outlined figures, lightly
sketched--as is the Autocrat's wont--by means of some trick of speech,
or dress, or feature, but they are quite life-like enough for their
purpose, which is mainly to {494} furnish listeners and foils to the
eloquence and wit of the chief talker.

In 1860 and 1867 Holmes entered the field of fiction with two
"medicated novels," _Elsie Venner_ and the _Guardian Angel_. The first
of these was a singular tale, whose heroine united with her very
fascinating human attributes something of the nature of a serpent; her
mother having been bitten by a rattlesnake a few months before the
birth of the girl, and kept alive meanwhile by the use of powerful
antidotes. The heroine of the _Guardian Angel_ inherited lawless
instincts from a vein of Indian blood in her ancestry. These two books
were studies of certain medico-psychological problems. They preached
Dr. Holmes's favorite doctrines of heredity and of the modified nature
of moral responsibility by reason of transmitted tendencies which limit
the freedom of the will. In _Elsie Venner_, in particular, the weirdly
imaginative and speculative character of the leading motive suggests
Hawthorne's method in fiction, but the background and the subsidiary
figures have a realism that is in abrupt contrast with this, and gives
a kind of doubleness and want of keeping to the whole. The Yankee
characters, in particular, and the satirical pictures of New England
country life are open to the charge of caricature. In the _Guardian
Angel_ the figure of Byles Gridley, the old scholar, is drawn with
thorough sympathy, and though some of his acts are improbable he is, on
the whole, Holmes's most {495} vital conception in the region of
dramatic creation.

James Russell Lowell (1819- ), the foremost of American critics and of
living American poets is, like Holmes, a native of Cambridge, and, like
Emerson and Holmes, a clergyman's son. In 1855 he succeeded Longfellow
as Professor of Modern Languages in Harvard College. Of late years he
has held important diplomatic posts, like Everett, Irving, Bancroft,
Motley, and other Americans distinguished in letters, having been
United States Minister to Spain, and, under two administrations, to the
Court of St. James. Lowell is not so spontaneously and exclusively a
poet as Lo