He is a dignified, ready and agreeable presiding officer. As a leader of club life he is eminently successful, whether it be the Round Table, the Browning, or the Appalachian Mountain Club. He enjoys a certain amount of this kind of intellectual recreation; and fortunate is the club which secures his kindly and gracious guidance. Very early a reader of Browning, he is thoroughly familiar with the works of that poet, and rejoices in whatever extends a knowledge of his writings. Especially has he been the soul of the Round-Table Club, which meets fortnightly in Boston parlors--an association full of good-fellowship, the spirit of thoughtful inquiry, and earnest sympathy with the best intellectual life of the time. As Colonel Higginson walks along the street, much of the soldier’s bearing appears; for he is tall and erect, and keeps the soldier’s true dignity of movement. His chivalric spirit pervades much that he has written, but it is tempered and refined by the artistic instinct for grace and beauty. He has the manly and heroic temper, but none of the soldier’s rudeness or love of violence. So he appears in his books as of knightly metal, but as a knight who also loves the rôle of the troubadour. A master of style, he does not write for the sake of decoration and ornament. He is emphatically a scholar and a lover of books, but not in the scholastic sense. A lover of ideas, an idealist by nature and conviction, he sees in the things of the human spirit what is more than all the scholar’s lore and knowledge wrung from the physical world. He is a scholar who learns of men and events more than of books; and yet what wealth of classic and literary allusion is his throughout all his books and addresses! Whether in the study or in the camp, on the platform or in the State House, his tastes are literary and scholarly; but his sympathies are with all that is natural, manly and progressive. Seven months of last year Colonel Higginson spent in Europe, and he has just finished a life of Longfellow in the “American Men of Letters” series. GEORGE WILLIS COOKE. DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES IN BEACON STREET