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Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes proposes in _Elsie Venner_, it is strange
that a man whom it had sincerely disquieted should present it--not in its
own insolubility but--in caricature. As though the secrets of the
inherited body and soul needed to be heightened by a bit of burlesque
physiology! It is in spite of our protest against the invention of
Elsie's horrible plight--a conception and invention which Dr. Oliver
Wendell Holmes should feel to be essentially frivolous--that the serpent-
maiden moves us deeply by her last 'Good night,' and by the gentle phrase
that tells us 'Elsie wept.' But now, if Dr. Holmes shall succeed in
proposing the question of separate responsibility so as to convince every
civilised mind of his doubts, there will be curiously little change
wrought thereby in the discipline of the world. For Dr. Holmes
incidentally lets us know that he cherishes and values the instinct of
intolerance and destructiveness in presence of the cruel, the
self-loving, and the false. Negation of separate moral responsibility,
when that negation is tempered by a working instinct of intolerance and
destructiveness, will deal with the felon, after all, very much in the
manner achieved by the present prevalent judicialness, unscientific
though it may be. And to say this is to confess that Dr. Oliver Wendell
Holmes has worked, through a number of books, to futile purpose. His
books are justified by something quite apart from his purpose.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

The United States have produced authors not a few; among some names not
the most famous, perhaps, on the popular tongue, are two or three names
of their poets; but they have hardly given to the world more than one man
of letters--judicious, judicial, disinterested, patient, happy,
temperate, delighted. The colonial days, with the 'painful' divines who
brought the parish into the wilderness; the experimental period of
ambition and attempts at a literature that should be young as the soil
and much younger than the race; the civil-war years, with a literature
that matched the self-conscious and inexpert heroism of the army;--none
of these periods of the national life could fitly be represented by a man
of letters. And though James Russell Lowell was the contemporary of the
'transcendentalists,' and a man of middle age when the South seceded, and
though indeed his fame as a Yankee humourist is to be discerned through
the smoke and the dust, through the gra