Complete Project Gutenberg Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Works

58. AEt

aces.-Anti-Slavery Add

's Rights Convention.

"English Traits."-The

rday

. In January, 1855, he gave one of the lectures in a course of Anti-Slavery Addresses delivered in Tremont Temple, Boston. In the same year he delivered an address before the Anti-Slavery party of New York. His plan for the extirpation of slavery was to buy the slaves from the pl

and in hand with the Abolitionists. He was classed with the Free Soilers, but he seems to have formed a party by himself in his project for buying up t

som to t

the bag t

wner? The sl

r was.

ssive of sympathy with John Brown. But he was never in the front rank of the aggressive Anti-Slavery men. In his singular "Ode inscribed to W.H.

ove

es Right

les, unp

exter

stronge

y white

to bri

f the

justify himself when he refused to leave hi

are of t

ke's words, "As the agitation proceeded, and brave men took part in it, and it rose to

*

onvention" in 1855, he takes bold, and what would then have been considered somewhat advanced, ground i

hem, let them enter a school as freely as a church, let them have and hold and give their property as men do theirs;-and in a few years it will easily appear whether they wish a voice in making the laws that are to govern them. If you do refuse them a vote, you will also refuse to tax

oke of him in Concord before his fellow-citizens, shortly after his death, in 1856. He afterwards prepared a sketch of

o called under an impression that the style is passing away, but which, I suppose, is an optical illusion, as t

us enough and descriptive enough for

December p

truth and con

in his su

n his lib

ttacks the wearying pages in which they are recorded. Shrewd observation there is indeed, but its strength is in broad generalization and epigrammatic characterizations. They are not to be received as in any sense final; they are not like the verifiable facts of sc

nd which take up the principal portion of his record. Only one place is given as the heading of a chapter,-Stonehen

n introducing us to the

Aristo

y; they burned, harried, violated, tortured, and killed, until everything English was brought to the verge of ruin. Such, however, is the illusion of antiquity and wealth, that decent and dignified men now existin

some of its bette

he old men are as red as roses, and still handsome. A clear skin, a p

landers is an island himself, safe, tranquil, incommunicable." They are positive, methodical, cleanly, and forma

re decorum rules the court and the cottage. Pretension and vaporing are once for all distasteful

ngland, not the Trial by Jury, but t

n English."-"They require the same adherence, t

American, I think them

country are much more

ordance with that of Cotton Mat

of even pious people, who have contracted those Melancholy Indispositions, which have unhinged them from all service or comfort; yea, not a

the Englishman, it has truth enough to excuse its high coloring, a

tradicted; no pretension unexamined. They chew hasheesh; cut themselves with poisoned creases, swing their hammock in the boughs of the Bohon Upas, taste every poison, buy every secret; at Naples, they put St. Januarius's blood in an alembic; they saw a hole into the head of the 'winking

cture might be hung up

description of Ho

pronounce them stupid; but, later, do them justice as people who wear well, or hide their strength.-High and low, they are of an unctuous texture.-Th

and making itself a war of opinions also (a question of despotism and liberty coming from Eastern Europe), should menace the English civiliz

rrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal,-or if they do, never think of denying that they have done it. But this was a generation ago, when the noun "shoddy," and the verb "to scamp," had not grown such

nd fashionable enough not to be disturbed by Emerson's flas

lishman come into his ambassador's chapel, and put his face for silent prayer into his smooth-brushed

possession. If a bishop meets an intelligent gentleman, and reads fatal

one at a dinner-table,-and if next an archbishop, used to roll crumbs with both hands,--but Sydney Smith would have enjoyed the tingling felicity of this last stinging

of the Established Church very freely, but he clos

le monde, et ne faire souffrir personne, that divine secret has existed in England from the days of Al

s merely an occasional after-dinner reply to a toast which called him up, but it had sentences in it which, if we can ima

*

He alternates between a turn of genuine admiration and a smile as at a people that has not outgrown its playthings. This is in truth the natural and genuine feeling of a self-governing citizen of a commonwealth where thrones and wigs and mitres seem like so many pieces of stage property. An American need not be a philosopher to hold these things cheap. He cannot help it. Madame T

the enterprise, were the publishers. Many of the old contributors to "The Dial" wrote for the new magazine, among them Emerson. He contributed twenty-eight articles in all, more than half of them verse, to different n

iation, which became at last well known as the "Saturday Club,"

en been erroneously thought to have some organic connection, and the "Atlantic Club" ha

sat Longfellow, florid, quiet, benignant, soft-voiced, a most agreeable rather than a brilliant talker, but a man upon whom it was always pleasant to look,-whose silence was better than many another man's conversation. At the other end of the table sat Agassiz, robust, sanguine, animated, full of talk, boy-like in his laughter. The stranger who should have asked who were the men ranged along the sides of the table would have heard in answer the names of Hawthorne, Motley, Dana, Lowell, Whipple, Peirce, the distinguished mathematician, Judge Hoar, eminent at the bar and in the cabinet, Dwight, the leading musical

no Boswell, and its golde