The range of topics cannot be better shown than by reference to the index--and the original edition was extraordinary in its day for having one. The "A's," for example, include abuse of all good attempts, affinities, and antipathies, age, animal under air-pump, the American a reënforced Englishman, the effect of looking at the Alps, the power of seeing analogies, why anniversaries are dreaded by the professor, the arguments which spoil conversation, the forming American aristocracy, the use of stimulants by artists, the effect of meeting one of heaven's assessors, and so on. The order in which they fall is hardly more casual than in the index. Witness the eleventh paper: puns, "The Deacon's Masterpiece," slang, dandies, aristocracy, intellectual green fruit, Latinized diction (with the verses "Æstivation"), seashore and mountains, summer residences, space, the Alps, moderate wishes (with the verses "Contentment"), faithfulness in love, picturesque spots in Boston, natural beauties in a city, dusting a library, experiencing life, a proposal of marriage. The difference between their structure and that of the formal essay is simply that they meander like a stream instead of following a predetermined course like a canal. In the later members of the series, and particularly in the third and fourth, there is an evident response to the current of nineteenth-century thinking. By nature Holmes was a liberal but not a reformer. He took no active part in "movements," though he sympathized with many of them and with the intentions of their wiser promoters. At the same time he preferred for his own part to induce and persuade people into new paths rather than to shock and offend them while they were still treading the old ones. There is a note of considerate caution in his espousal of new ideas. He was the type of man who will always be unsatisfactory to extremists,--a dangerous person to the hidebound conservative and a tentative trifler to the ultraradical. His open-mindedness is charmingly demonstrated in the book of his old age, "Over the Teacups." Few men of eighty succeed in keeping their eyes off the past and their voices from decrying the present, but Holmes in his latest years was as interested in the developments of the day as he had been in the prime of life.