The genius of Oliver Wendell Holmes was almost unique in the fact that, dealing almost exclusively with human beings--not merely human nature exhibited in maxims--rarely wandering into discussions of books or art or landscape--it was almost entirely independent of any environment whatever. He was anchored to one locality almost as securely as Judd was to New England or Howe to the West; for a chronological record of the events of his life makes no mention of any journeys, except the two years and a half as medical student in Europe, when he was twenty-four years old, and “One Hundred Days in Europe” in 1887. He spent every winter in Boston, every summer at Beverly Farms, which, like Nahant, may almost be called “cold roast Boston”; yet during the fifty years he wrote from Boston, he neither sought his material from his special environment nor tried to escape from it. It is human nature, not Boston nature, that he has drawn for us. Once, in “Elsie Venner,” there is an escape like Hawthorne’s into the realm of the psychological and weird; several times in the novels there are photographic bits of a New England “party,” or of New England character; but the great mass of the work which has appealed to so wide a class of readers with such permanent power appeals to them because, dealing with men and women, it deals with no particular men and women. Indeed, it is hardly even men, women, and children that troop through his pages; but rather man, woman, and child. His human beings are no more Bostonians than the ducks of his “Aviary” are Charles River ducks. They are ducks. He happened to see them on the Charles River; nay, within the still narrower limits of his own window-pane; still, they are ducks, and not merely Boston ducks. The universality of his genius is wonderful, not because he exhibits it in writing now a clever novel about Rome, now a powerful sketch of Montana, and anon a remarkable book about Japan; but it is wonderful because it discovers within the limits of Boston only what is universal. To understand perfectly how fine such work as this is, you need never have been anywhere, yourself, or have read any other book; any more than you would have to be one of the “Boys of ’29” to appreciate the charming class-poems that have been delighting the world, as well as the “Boys,” for fifty years. In “Little Boston” he has, it is true, impaled some of the characteristics which are generally known as Bostonian; but his very success in doing this is of a kind to imply that he had studied his Bostonian only in Paris or St. Louis; for the peculiar traits described are those no Bostonian is supposed to be able to see for himself, still less to acknowledge. If Dr. Holmes were to have spent a winter in New York, he would have carried back with him, not material for a “keen satire on New York society,” but only more material of what is human. Nay, he probably would not have carried back with him anything at all which