Dr. Holmes was one of the most versatile of men. We saw him here at home with the oar in the open. He was an excellent professor of anatomy, renowned for his insight and readiness in adapting means to ends in the difficult science where his main work lay. Literature was merely his hobby, and he was wit, critic, philosopher, historian, poet, good in all. Many a brilliant man has come to wreck through being too versatile. "_Ne sutor ultra crepidam_" is undoubtedly a good motto for the ordinary man, but sticking to his last was something to which Dr. Holmes could never bring himself, and in a marvellous way his abounding genius proved masterful in a score of varying fields. But I have no purpose here to discuss or account for Dr. Holmes. He was a delightful phenomenon in the life of the nineteenth century, with whom I chanced to be somewhat in touch, and it is for me only to note a bit of the scintillation which I saw brilliantly diffused. He was frequently under my gaze, a low-statured, nimble figure, a vivacious, always cheerful face with a pronounced chin, seemingly ever on the brink of some outburst of merriment. I have heard him described as an "incarnate pun," but that hardly did him justice; punster he was, but he had a wit of a far higher kind and moods of grave dignity. His literary fame in those years was only incipient, his better work was just then beginning. The world appreciated him as a humourist of the lighter kind and capable, too, of spirited verse like _Old Ironsides_; it was not understood that he possessed profounder powers and could stir men to the depths. I have a vivid image of him at a banquet of the Harvard Alumni Association of which he was Second Vice-President, clothed in white summer garb, standing in a chair that his little figure might be in evidence in the crowd, merrily rattling off a string of amusing verses. "I thank you, Mr. President, You kindly broke the ice, Virtue should always go before, I'm only _second vice_."