tion does for species. He is a critic who would fain eliminate whatsoever can be destroyed in the Christian system. Yet how much, by his own confession, is left standing? Will any less eloquent and well-furnished agnostic do more? If not, we may feel grateful to the man who, with an unbought zeal and the industry of years in many departments, has but succeeded in showing that now, since the growth of Science has made of Materialism a baseless absurdity, the reign of Reason, culminating in the Righteousness that rules the world, can be the only sound issue of age-long controversies. The agnostic perceives that matter and motion have not resolved 'the terrible problems of existence.' Yet a solution there must be; and when Religion gives personality to the mind which Science is continually employing but so often fails to interpret, we may expect that, instead of a haughty and most unfruitful' Ignoramus,' we shall hear from the lips of those whom it has trained to knowledge, the Te Deum which philosophy justifies and duty demands. ART. ART. VIII.—The Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes. In Thirteen Volumes. Riverside Edition. London, 1891. HE parentage, childhood, and early surroundings of a man interest. But in the case of Oliver Wendell Holmes they possess a special value for the literary critic. They imparted to his works a characteristic flavour; they shaped his views of literature and society; they dictated his choice of the audience to which he appealed; they directed his mind into the particular groove of thought that partially explains the welcome which his writings have always received in the Old World. Above all, they implanted and fostered those refined instincts, which led him to oppose the premature effort of his contemporaries to force originality, and to condemn as unreasonable the demand, made half a century ago, that Transatlantic literature should appear in a new shape, 'shaggy and unshorn, shaking the earth like a herd of buffaloes.' Nurtured in the best traditions of Old-World scholarship, he felt no sympathy with the young American movement for the assertion of literary independence. Bred upon English models, and living among cultivated men in an University town, he did not, like some of his contemporaries, revolt against the established canons of art, or push the principle of Republicanism into the world of letters. Careful in his choice of poetical subjects, and conservative in his adherence to accepted rules of rhyme or rhythm, he never echoed the impatience of Judge Story, who grew 'tired,' as he told his son, 'of the endless imitations of the forms and figures and topics of British poetry.' To his ancestry and his early training Holmes owed, as we think, some of the most prominent features in the peculiar position that he occupied in the literary life of his country. From first to last he was a sturdy opponent of the lawless independence which at one time threatened to vulgarise the literature of the New World, and thence to extend its influence to England. Another reason for laying stress on the parentage of Holmes is supplied by two of his best-known novels. Though • Elsie Venner' and 'The Guardian Angel' had the object of demonstrating the cruelty of the most extreme doctrine of original sin, they were also both written to illustrate the limits set to human responsibility by inherited tendencies. The theory was a favourite one with their author. It reappears, again and again, in his writings; it supplies the main argument to his essay on 'Crime and Automatism.' He would have said himself that in his mental equipments he was what his fore fathers fathers had made him. He compares the body in which we Through his mother his ancestors were Dutch. 'Fair cousin Wendell P., Our ancestors were dwellers beside the Zuyder Zee; He writes to And Vondel was our namesake, though he spelt it with a V.' He claimed kinship with Mrs. Anne Bradstreet, the daughter of one and the wife of another of the early Governors of Massachusetts, and the writer of the first volume of original poetry that was published in America (1642). His greatgrandmother was Dorothy Quincy, of whose Norman lineage he was proud, and whose portrait as a child of thirteen, with hanging sleeves of green brocade, and a green parrot on her hand, was one of his most treasured heirlooms. Among the inside passengers who have occupied seats in Holmes's omnibus were men and women of different race and varying temperament. Wedged between the black-browed Puritans were gay, mercurial Cavaliers; beside the phlegmatic Dutchmen sate livelier companions, in whose veins still ran the warmer blood of the sprightly Gaul. Oliver Wendell Holmes was born in 1809 at Cambridge, U.S.A. Readers of 'The Breakfast Table' series will remember the lines which he somewhere puts in the mouth of the Professor: 'Know old Cambridge? Hope you do. Born there? Don't say so! I was, too. -Nicest place that ever was seen,— Colleges red and Common green, Sidewalks brownish with trees between.' His father, the Rev. Abiel Holmes, was a clergyman of Calvinistic but not illiberal views, a scholar, an author, and an antiquarian. The sternest Calvinism was then the orthodox system of belief in America, accepted by children as part of their education, and as the belief of the religious world. But the narrow creed and cruel dogmas of Jonathan Edwards came to Holmes softened by the milder teaching of his mother. He shared the experience of Bryant. It was not,' as he himself says of the poet, in words that apply to his own case, "the "five points" which remained in his memory and shaped his higher life. It was the influence of his mother that left its permanent impression after the questions and answers of the Assembly's Catechism had faded out, or remained in memory only as fossil survivors of an extinct or fast-disappearing theological formation.' Though always a man of too practical and scientific a turn to join in the Transcendental movement, he yet played a considerable part in the revolt against some of the harsher doctrines of the Calvinistic creed, and received no small share of the abuse which many theologians lavished on the rebels. Cambridge in 1809, or as Lowell described it Thirty Years Ago,' or as it was in the days when 'Zekle' courted Hulday,' was a country village with large open and woodland spaces. The village had not yet become a suburb, for Boston was still no larger than a town. As the seat of the oldest University in America, it preserved in its atmosphere some of the cloistered quiet and intellectual repose that reminded Clough of Oxford. Its few towers rose above elms, lindens, and horse-chestnuts which had seen Massachusetts a colony. Through its green and purple salt marshes the Charles River slipped smoothly towards the sea. To Holmes the place, where he spent some of the happiest years of his life, as a child, an undergraduate, and a Professor, A kind of harbour seems to be, Facing the flow of a boundless sea. Rolling between them, soft and green, Breaks the wave of bright sixteen One wave, two waves, three waves, four- Then it ebbs to flow no more, Round Round the Cambridge Common, upon which the gambrel house opened, strayed a few old houses, built in the colonial days, and standing back, as it were with folded arms, from the vulgar highway, from whose windows women had watched Lord Percy march to the Chevy Chase of Lexington. Some were perhaps still tenanted by those who regretted the War of Independence, and had seen 'no gentry since the Vassalls went.' The house in which Holmes was born was not, as he has said, a stately, dignified stronghold of Tory Episcopalian churchgoers; but it was full of Old-World suggestions. It had wainscots and a crypt-like cellar, a garret in which a ghost might stand erect, and beams that yet bore the marks of the broad axe which felled and shaped the forest timber. It had its family portraits, its library of books with Pope, Tillotson, and Barrow and other worthies, its family silver, its claw-footed chairs, its bevel-edged mirrors, its black mahogany tables, its tall upright cabinets. In this house General Ward fixed his head-quarters after Lexington; there he entertained Washington; there Benedict Arnold received his first commission. There was planned the movement which led to the fortification of Bunker's Hill; there Warren slept the night before the battle; there President Langdon prayed God's blessing on the men as they set out on their apparently desperate expedition. From the walls hung the picture of Dorothy Q.,' with the rent in the canvas which marked, as tradition alleged, the thrust of a British rapier. The floors were still dented, as the same tradition records, by the butts of the firelocks of the Continental militia. In the parlour stood the arm-chair in which Lord Percy sate to have his hair dressed, and in it hung the mirror by which he had dusted the powder from his red coat. Nor was it only in the building and furniture of the house that links with the War of Independence still survived. In Holmes's youth, one of the party who threw the tea overboard in Boston Harbour was a familiar figure in cocked hat, buckled shoes, and knee-breeches. On one side of the house ran an oldfashioned garden, where lilacs grew side by side with nectarines, and plebeian vegetables shouldered and jostled patrician flowers, and where the little boy used to dream and play Consule Jacobo Madisonio.' In one corner of the garden stood the pear-tree which first taught him the vanity of human wishes, and under it grew tall sunflowers, round which flitted the yellow birds like flakes of curdled sunshine.' The prose and verse of Holmes are filled with delightful reminiscences of his childhood, his hopes and fancies, his omens, fears and superstitions, his likes and dislikes to the ministers who |