think of a young gentleman who, in the heat of the Civil War, was most courteously welcomed by the men I have mentioned, and who is half afraid to give full utterance to feelings which might seem overstrained, and yet equally anxious not to appear deficient in warmth of gratitude. I must, however, venture to make a few of the remarks about Holmes which are suggested by this biography; though I am not quite sure whether the vividness of certain very pleasant memories is a qualification or the reverse.
I have said that Holmes's career was singularly simple. He was born in 1809, and passed a long life almost continuously at Boston and the immediate neighbourhood, his only long absence being caused by two years of medical studies at Paris. On returning he set up as a physician without obtaining much practice. He married in 1840, in 1847 became professor in the medical school at Harvard, and held the office for thirty-five years. He retired in 1882, at the age of seventy-three, and survived as a venerated and happy old man till 1894. His works are not voluminous; and, though he had published some of his best verses before he was thirty, he was nearly fifty before he began the series of essays which really
