Read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" for Mrs. Stowe's attitude toward the people of the South in distinction to her attitude toward the institution of slavery. Read "Oldtown Folks" or "The Minister's Wooing" for Mrs. Stowe's exposition of the orthodox theology in either. If you can read both, note whether there is any difference in her attitude toward the faith of her fathers in the two books. Compare Mrs. Stowe's New England village characters with those of Oliver Wendell Holmes in any of his three novels. Compare for the broad picture of a community and an epoch George Eliot's "Middlemarch" and Mrs. Stowe's "Oldtown Folks." Develop more fully the comparison or the contrast between "Oldtown Folks" and Mrs. Deland's "The Iron Woman." CHAPTER XXI OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES In the roster of American men of letters it is hard to think of any other who is so completely the product of a district and the spokesman for it as Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894). His whole lifetime was passed in two neighborhoods--that of Harvard College in old Cambridge and that of Beacon Hill in oldest Boston. He was born in the college town in 1809, the same year with Lincoln. His father, the Reverend Abiel Holmes, was a fine exponent of the old orthodoxy and of the old breeding and a historian of the American Revolution. He was an inheritor of the blood of the Bradstreet, Phillips, Hancock, Quincy, and Wendell families, a kind of youth whose "aspect is commonly slender,--his face is smooth, and apt to be pallid,--his features are regular and of a certain delicacy,--his eye is bright and quick,--his lips play over the thought he utters as a pianist's fingers dance over their music."[27] It was a type for whose aptitudes Holmes felt the greatest respect. He thanked God for the republicanism of nature which every now and then developed a "large, uncombed youth" who strode awkwardly into intellectual leadership. He acknowledged a Lincoln when he came to maturity, but he expected more of a Chauncey or an Ellery or an Edwards because of his inheritance. [27] "Elsie Venner," chap. i, "The Brahmin Caste of New England."