has the beautiful hush of a sanctuary in it. A finer verse could not be written. Also for a comic piece nothing equal to "The Wonderful One-hoss Shay" has appeared since Burns's "Tam O'Shanter." It is based on a logical illusion which brings it down to recent times, and the gravity with which the story is narrated makes its impossibility all the more amusing. The building of the chaise is described with a practical accuracy of detail, and yet with a poetical turn to every verse:
"The hubs of logs from the 'Settler's ellum',-- Last of its timber,--they couldn't sell 'em; Never an axe had seen their chips, And the wedges flew from between their lips, Their blunt ends frizzled like celery-tips";
I believe that even cultivated readers have found more real satisfaction in the "One-Hoss Shay" than in many a more celebrated lyric.
Doctor Holmes lived amid a comparatively narrow circle of friends and acquaintances. He attended the Saturday Club, but Lowell appears to have been the only member of it with whom he was on confidential terms. He was rarely seen or heard of in Longfellow's house. In the winter of 1878 he met Mrs. L. Maria Child for the first time at the Chestnut Street Club. It appears that she did not catch his name when he was introduced to her, and stranger still did not recognize his face. When the Doctor inquired concerning her literary occupation she replied that she considered herself too old to drive a quill any longer, and then fortunately added: "Now, there is Doctor Holmes, I think he shows his customary good judgment in retiring from the literary field in proper season." What the Doctor thought of this is unknown, but he still continued to write.
At the age of seventy his _alma mater_ conferred on Doctor Holmes an LL.D., and this was followed soon afterwards by Oxford and Cambridge, in England; but why was it not given ten or fifteen years earlier, when Holmes was in his prime? Then it might have been a service and a satisfaction to him; but when a man is seventy such tributes have small value for him. There had been an _Atlantic_ breakfast for Doctor Holmes in Boston, and a Holmes breakfast in New York. He was in the public eye, and by honoring him the University honored itself. So Harvard conferred an LL.D. on General Winfield Scott just before the fatal battle of Bull Run,--instead of after his brilliant Mexican campaign. If the degree was not conferred on Holmes for his literary work, what reason could be assigned for it; and if he deserved it on that account, Emerson and Hawthorne certainly deserved it much more. Let us be thankful that no such mischief was contemplated. If honorary degrees are to be given in order to attract attention to a university, or worse still, for the purpose of obtaining legacies, they had better be abolished altogether.