1839-1840

1840

1847-1882

1858

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1890

1894, Oct. 7

Professor of anatomy at Dartmouth College.

Married Miss Amelia L. Jackson.

Professor of anatomy in Harvard Medical
School.

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.
Elsie Venner.

In Europe.

Over the Teacups.

Died in Boston.

Ancestry. The year 1809 is noted for the birth of many illustrious men. Among this number will be found Gladstone, Lincoln, Tennyson, Poe, Darwin, and Holmes. The subject of this sketch was not a great statesman like Gladstone or Lincoln, a great poet like Tennyson or Poe, or a great scientist like Darwin. He occupies a unique place in literature as the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table." Oliver Wendell Holmes was born August 29, 1809, in an "old gambrel-roofed house" in Cambridge, near the Washington Elm. John Holmes, one of his ancestors, had settled in Woodstock, Connecticut, as early as 1686. His father, Abiel Holmes, was a graduate of Yale and an Orthodox Congregational minister who, in addition to his ministerial duties, found time to write some verse, and his Annals of America is a work which deserves high commendation. The poet's mother, Sarah Wendell, was the daughter of Oliver Wendell of Boston, who sprang from good

old Holland stock. Holmes liked to mention the fact that on his mother's side he was descended from Anne Bradstreet, the "tenth muse," as she was called by her contemporaries. By birth and by instinct Holmes was an aristocrat. He himself says in The Autocrat:

"I go for the man with the family portraits against the one with the twenty-five cent daguerreotype, unless I find out that the latter is the better of the two."

Education.

When Holmes was a lad of six he was sent to a school kept by Dame Prentiss, where he remained for four years. In his recollections of his childhood he tells us that he remembers distinctly a long switch that was suspended over the teacher's desk and a pail of water which still retained the flavor of the pine wood. The next five years he attended a school at Cambridgeport, where he pursued such studies as would fit him for Harvard. Here Margaret Fuller was his fellow-pupil. His last year of preparatory work was done at Phillips Andover Academy. His life in the academy was uneventful except for the friendship that he formed with Phineas Barnes, which lasted for His letters to Barnes are among the many years. most charming that he ever wrote.

Holmes speaks of having tumbled about in his father's library, and he gives us a very interesting

account of how he conducted his reading. He says:

"I have always read in books rather than through them, and always with more profit from the books I read in than the books I read through; for when I set out to read through a book, I always felt that I had a task before me, but when I read in a book it was the page or the paragraph that I wanted, and which left its impression and became a part of my intellectual furniture."

Holmes entered Harvard with the class of 1829, the year in which Hawthorne and Longfellow received their degress from Bowdoin. In his class were James Freeman Clarke, Benjamin Peirce, the mathematician, and S. F. Smith, the author of America.

Holmes was popular in his class, his keen wit and lively manner making friends everywhere. While in college he contributed several poems to The Collegian, some of which were an earnest of what he was to do in later life. In acknowledgment of his successful achievements he was elected class poet.

After Graduation. The year after his graduation was spent in the Harvard Law School, but, disliking the study of law, he turned to that of medicine, and, after attending two courses of lectures at Boston, he sailed for Paris to complete his medical studies there. For two years he at

tended lectures faithfully, and seemed to have been anxious to acquire knowledge in his chosen profession. In one of his letters written home we find the following passage which throws considerable light on his character:

"I can go home, if I must," he says, "but while I am here I will not eat a dinner for twenty-five sous and drink sour wine at a shabby restaurant. . . . But let me say that I have no disposition to extravagance, and that probably I spend less money on pure gratification than most of the young men with whom I associate. To speak definitely, you may consider my expenses as at least twelve hundred dollars a year books -instruments - private instruction (which costs a good deal), and everything else included. I tell you that it is not throwing away money, because nine tenths of it goes straight into my head in the shape of knowledge."

Before returning home Holmes visited Italy and England. He was especially interested in Rome, and in another letter he says:

"If modern Rome did not exist, still the world would come here to look at the monuments of antiquity, and if all the traces of ancient Rome were effaced, the great masters of the arts in modern times would have been enough to have made it a center of the schools of all Europe."

On his visit to England he had the pleasure of seeing Queen Victoria, then a young girl of fifteen.