ssessed, in spite of all his limitations in poetic range, true
devotion, patriotism, humor, and pathos.

His poetry was in the best sense of the word "occasional," and his prose
was only an incidental or accidental harvest of a long career in which
his chief duty was that of a professor of anatomy in the Harvard Medical
School. He had studied in Paris under sound teachers, and after some
years of private practice won the appointment which he held, as active
and emeritus professor, for forty-seven years. He was a faithful, clear,
and amusing lecturer, and printed two or three notable medical essays,
but his chief Boston reputation, in the eighteen-fifties, was that of
a wit and diner-out and writer of verses for occasions. Then came
his great hour of good luck in 1857, when Lowell, the editor of the
newly-established "Atlantic Monthly," persuaded him to write "The
Autocrat of the Breakfast Table." It was the public's luck also, for
whoever had been so unfortunate as not to be born in Boston could now
listen--as if across the table--to Boston's best talker. Few volumes of
essays during the last sixty years have given more pleasure to a greater
variety of readers than is yielded by "The Autocrat." It gave the Doctor
a reputation in England which he naturally prized, and which contributed
to his triumphal English progress, many years later, recorded pleasantly
in "Our Hundred Days." "The Professor at the Breakfast Table" and "The
Poet at the Breakfast Table" are less successful variations of "The
Autocrat." Neither professors nor poets are at their best at this meal.
Holmes wrote three novels--of which "Elsie Venner," a somewhat too
medical story, is the best remembered--memoirs of his friends Emerson
and Motley, and many miscellaneous essays. His life was exceptionally
happy, and his cheery good opinion of 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 Ho