for some kind act, and then you are sure of him." The other adds that he has a "powerful jaw and a thick strong under-lip, that gives decision to his look, with a dash of pertness. In conversation he is animated and cordialsharp, too, taking the words out of one's mouth."

At this time, before the publication of The Autocrat, he was famous for his talk and for his verses. The verses were for the most part inspired by dinners and "occasions"; they light up for us the circle of American men of letters who met and talked at Parker's Hotel, as men had talked at Will's Coffee House; they are addressed to people who know each other well. His reputation, therefore, independently of his medical works, was very intense, but very local. He was almost fifty when the first of The Autocrat papers "came from my mind almost with an explosion." The Professor and The Poet followed; then there were the two novels; he became, in short, a man of letters from whom the public expects a regular statement of opinion. Even at this distance it is easy to imagine the rush with which The Autocrat came into the world. Every breakfast table in Boston, as Mr. Townsend says, knew the writer by repute, knew of his birth and traditions, and read his views in print with a kind of personal pride, as though he were the mouthpiece of a family. Those associations are no longer ours; but, as the manner of beauty clings when beauty is gone, so we can still relish the gusto with which Dr. Holmes addressed himself to his fellow-citizens.

This is true, and yet is it possible that we should not dwell upon such considerations if we were altogether beneath The Autocrat's spell? There is, we must own it, a little temptation to try to account for our ancestors' tastes, and so to avoid formulating our own. The chief interest, however, of

these centenary celebrations is that they provide an opportunity for one generation to speak its mind of another with a candor and perhaps with an insight which contemporaries may hardly possess. The trial is sharp, for the books that live to such an age will live to a much greater age, and raise the standard of merit very high. Let us own at once that Dr. Holmes's works can hardly be said to survive in the sense that they still play any part in our lives; nor is he among the writers who live on without any message to deliver because of the sheer delight that we take in their art. The fact that there is some one-Mr. Townsend, to wit-who will write a centenary biography for a public that reads The Autocrat cannot be set down to either of these causes; and yet, if we seek it on a lower plane, we shall surely find reason enough. There is, to begin with, the reason that our own experience affords us. When we take it up at a tender age-for it is one of the first books that one reads for oneself-it tastes like champagne after breakfast cups of weak tea. The miraculous ease with which the talk flows on, the richness of simile and anecdote, the humor and the pathos, the astonishing maturity of the style, and, above all, some quality less easy to define, as though fruits just beyond our reach were being dropped plump into our hands and proving deliciously firm and bright-these sensations make it impossible to think of the Autocrat save as an elderly relative who has pressed half-sovereigns into one's palm and at the same time flattered one's self esteem. Later, if some of the charm is gone, one is able to appraise these virtues more soberly. They have curiously enough, far more of the useful than of the ornamental in their composition. We are more impressed, that is, by the honesty and the common sense of the Autocrat's remarks,

and by the fact that they are the fruit of wide observation, than by the devices with which they are decked out. The pages of the book abound with passages like the following:

Two men are walking by the polyphlosbœan ocean, one of them having a small tin cup with which he can scoop up a gill of sea-water when he will, and the other nothing but his hands, which will hardly hold water at alland you call the tin cup a miraculous possession! It is the ocean that is the miracle, my infant apostle! Nothing is clearer than that all things are in all things, and that just according to the intensity and extension of our mental being we shall see the many in the one and the one in the many. Did Sir Isaac think what he was saying when he made his speech about the oceanthe child and the pebbles, you know? Did he mean to speak slightingly of a pebble? Of a spherical solid which stood sentinel over its compartment of space before the stone that became the pryamids had grown solid, and has watched it until now! A body which knows all the currents of force that traverse the globe; which holds by invisible threads to the ring of Saturn and the belt of Orion! A body from the contemplation of which the archangel could infer the entire inorganic universe as the simplest of corollaries! A throne of the all-pervading Deity, who has guided its very atom since the rosary of heaven was strung with beaded stars!

This is sufficiently plausible and yet light in weight; the style shares what we are apt to think the typical American defect of over-ingenuity and an uneasy love of decoration; as though they had not yet learnt the art of sitting still. The universe to him, as he says, "swam in an ocean of similitudes and analogies"; but the imaginative power which is thus implied is often more simply and more happily displayed. The sight of old things inspires him, or memories of boyhood.

Now, the sloop-of-war the Wasp, Captain Blakely, after gloriously capturing the Reindeer and the Avon, had disappeared from the face of the ocean, and was supposed to be lost. But there was no proof of it, and, of course, for a time, hopes were entertained that she might be heard from. Long after the last real chance had utterly vanished, I pleased myself with the fond illusion that somewhere on the waste of waters she was still floating, and there were years during which I never heard the sound of the great gun booming inland from the Navy-yard without saying to myself, "The Wasp has come!" and almost thinking I could see her, as she rolled in, crumpling the water before her, weather-beaten, barnacled, with shattered spars and threadbare canvas, welcomed by the shouts and tears of thousands. This was one of those dreams that I nursed and never told. Let me make a clean breast of it now, and say that, so late as to have outgrown childhood, perhaps to have got far on towards manhood, when the roar of the cannon has struck suddenly on my ear, I have started with a thrill of vague expectation and tremulous delight, and the long-unspoken words have articulated themselves in the mind's dumb whisper, The Wasp has come!

The useful virtues are there, nevertheless. The love of joy, in the first place, which raced in his blood from the cradle was even more of a virtue when The Autocrat was published than it is now. There were strict parents who forbade their children to read the book because it made free with the gloomy morality of the time. His sincerity, too, which would show itself in an acrid humor as a young man, gives an air of pugnacity to the kindly pages of The Autocrat. He hated pomp, and stupidity, and disease. It may not be due to the presence of high virtues, and yet how briskly his writing moves along! We can almost hear him talk, "taking the words out of one's mouth," in his eagerness to get them said.

Much of this animation is due to the easy and almost incessant play of the Autocrat's humor; and yet we doubt whether Dr. Holmes can be called a humorist in the true sense of the word. There is something that paralyses the will in humor, and Dr. Holmes was primarily a medical man who valued sanity above all things. Laughter is good, as fresh air is good, but he retracts instinctively if there is any fear that he has gone too deep:

I know it is a sin

For me to sit and grin

that is the kindly spirit that gives his humor its lightness, and, it must be added, its shallowness. For, when the range is so scrupulously limited, only a superficial insight is possible; if the world is only moderately ridiculous it can never be very sublime. But it is easy enough to account for the fact that his characters have little hold upon our sympathies by reflecting that Dr. Holmes did not write in order to create men and women, but in order to state the opinions which a lifetime of observation had taught him. We feel this even in the book which has at least the form of a novel. In "Elsie Venner" he wished to answer the question which he had asked as a child; can we be justly punished for an hereditary sin? The result is that we watch a skilful experiment; all Dr. Holmes's humor and learning (he kept a live rattlesnake for months, and read "all printed knowledge" about poison) play round the subject, and he makes us perceive how curious and interesting the case is. But for this is the sum of our objection-we are not interested in the heroine; and the novel so far as it seeks to convince us emotionally is a failure. Even so, Dr. Holmes sucThe Times.

ceeds, as he nearly always does succeed, in making us think; he presents so many facts about rattlesnakes and provincial life, so many reflections upon human life in general, with such briskness and such a lively interest in his own ideas, that the portentous "physiological conception, fertilized by a theological idea," is as fresh and almost as amusing as The Autocrat or The Professor. The likeness to these works, which no disguise of fiction will obscure, proves again that he could not, as he puts it, "get cut of his personality," but by that we only mean to define his powers in certain respects, for "personality" limits Shakespeare himself. We mean that he is one of those writers who do not see much more than other people see, and yet they see it with some indescribable turn of vision, which reveals their own character and serves to form their views into a coherent creed. Thus it is that his readers always talk of their "intimacy" with Dr. Holmes; they know what kind of person he was as well as what he taught. They know that he loved rowing and horses and great trees; that he was full of sentiment for his childhood; that he liked men to be strong and sanguine, and honored the weakness of women; that he loathed all gloom and unhealthiness; that charity and tolerance were the virtues he loved, and if one could combine them with wit it was so much to the good. Above all, one must enjoy life and live to the utmost of one's powers. It reads something like a medical prescription, and one does not want health alone. Nevertheless, when the obvious objections are made, we need not doubt that it will benefit thousands in the future, and they will love the man who lived as he wrote.

ing. Two old widows! [Confidentially.] My word, she did want to have this supper to-night at her own house! But it would have been too much for her. Your sister-in-law wouldn't hear of it, and she was quite right.

Francis. Of course! What does it matter, after all? The mater only has to step across the road. It's very convenient for her, living so close to John.

Mrs. D. [even more confidentially]. It saves the situation. Especially as your sister-in-law is so good. But you can understand your mother wanting to have the supper at her own house, can't ye?

Mrs. D. But what a fearful state your mother must have been in!

Francis [nodding]. There came a telegram this morning at eight o'clockmust have been sent off last night-to say he should arrive for lunch. Nothing else.

Mrs. D. And he hasn't come yet? Francis. No.

Mrs. D. I wondered why your mother wasn't at church this morning. I said to myself she must be stopping in to talk to Charlie. I never dreamt -and haven't you any ideaFrancis. I suppose!

-?

Oh! something unexpected, [Enter Annie, back.]

Annie. Well, Mrs. Downes, [kisses her] glad you've come early. Nice thing about Charlie, isn't it? Not been near Bursley for seven years, and now playing us this trick!

Mrs. D. Eh, my dear! What a state his mother must be in!

Annie. I should think so! And the children ill, into the bargain!

Mrs. D. The children ill?

Annie. Sickening for something. John's examined them. He thinks it may be measles. But he isn't sure. He's just been into the surgery to make something up, and now he's gone across to his mother's to see if there's any fresh news.

Annie. Oh, Emily takes it very well. I expect she knows her Charlie. Anyhow, she isn't one to work herself up into a state for nothing.

Mrs. D. I'm glad to hear it. What a good thing for him he's marrying a sensible girl! After all, there's none like a Five Towns wife, that I do say, go where you will. [Enter John, 1.]

John [with false calm]. Well, he's come. Hello, Mrs. Downes!

Mrs. D. Eh, but that's a relief! John. He's been at the mater's about half an hour. [Shakes hands absently with Mrs. Downes.] It seems he was kept by something unexpected yesterday-something about the "Mercury" he's very vague. Wired last night, but of course too late for delivery here! Started out in his motor this morning early, and had a breakdown near Tring that lasted seven hours. Cheerful! No telegraph office open in this Christian country! No train! However, he's here, car, chauffeur and all! He's sent the car down to the Tiger.

Annie. I hope he hasn't brought a valet your mother will worry quite enough as it is.