with perfect surfaces and accuracy of detail, and ornament which will show the least deviation from precision of line and modeling. It confines its forms of openings to the lintel, the round arch, and the circle or oval; it permits no accidental effects, no accommodation of one mass to another. Every part must be as perfect as the whole. To construct a small and comparatively inexpensive building in such a style almost. necessitates the use of meagre detail. The more picturesque styles, upon the other hand, give much greater latitude in design. At the very beginning, masses do not require such careful balancing; there are all sorts of methods of accommodating forms to one another. Any size or shape of opening may be used; each piece of carving or of ornament may be individual, and may form an object lesson in itself. The variety of material which can be used is unlimited, and brick seems as well suited to the styles as stone. In designing the suburban school, the first thing to be done is to avoid absolutely the appearance of an ornamented box; and this can be done either by the adoption of advancing or retreating wings, or, if this is impossible, by variation in the planes of the façade. The roofs, instead of being flat, should be pitched at greater or less angles. As it is desirable to have as much light as possible in the rooms, and as arched windows cut off the amount of light equivalent to the space occupied by their spandrels, it would be as well to adopt square-headed windows, but these should be grouped with mullions, and perhaps with transoms.

The school should have an inclosure or green upon either front or rear, and it would be better to have this walled than to leave it open. If it is possible to have a colonnaded or arcaded side aisle to this inclosure as an open air space for play in rainy weather, so much the better. The interiors of the schoolrooms should be plastered, and the walls wainscoted with high paneled wainscot; the

expense of this wainscot above that of the usual sheathed wainscot would not be excessive. The large hall should be made as beautiful as possible, with high vaulted or trussed ceiling with ornamented trusses; and this hall should have leaded windows, with the mottoes of the different classes of the school as ornamental escutcheons. These windows should not be of colored glass, excepting of the palest tints, and color should be confined to the escutcheons mentioned. If sculpture is possible, and it should be possible in memorial schools, and before long in municipal schools by private bequests, it should be confined to the entrances, to capitals and stringcourses and cornices. Pavements of encaustic tile, the ironwork upon the doors, grilles in the windows, each and all can be made to give character to the work.

It will be seen that the styles best suited to this class of work are the so-called free classic styles; that is, the Tudor, Elizabethan, Jacobean, and the actual Queen Anne, not its spurious American namesake.

There are, in addition to these styles, suggestions to be found in the architecture of the smaller French towns, especially those of Normandy and of the district of the Loire. This architecture has in common with those of England a freedom from excessive formality, and a consequent attractiveness when adopted for small buildings. If there is oppor tunity for any considerable expenditure, schools designed with classic porticos, with impressive arched entrances and vestibules, express civic dignity in the noblest terms, but such schools are seldom likely to appear. By far the larger proportion are necessarily of modest requirements, and it is particularly to these that the foregoing remarks are to be applied. When our cities become architecturally as well as numerically great, the school will naturally be built in a style to correspond with the nobility of the architecture surrounding it.

C. Howard Walker.

It was thirty-seven years ago that Dr. Holmes published in the first number of this magazine the opening paper of a series which gave distinction at once to The Atlantic Monthly. Since that day scarcely a volume has appeared without a word from him, and many of the volumes contain a poem, paper, or chapter of a novel in every number. So identified had he become with the fortunes of the magazine that, the day after his death, I received a communication addressed to him as editor. It was very fortunate for all of us that he never was its editor, for he would have been so scrupulous that he would have expended his energies on other people's work, and we should have missed some of his own.

The constancy with which he held to this medium of communication with the reading public hints at a notable characteristic of his nature which finds abundant expression in his writings.

Dr.

Holmes had the passion of local patriotism. No one need be told who has read his stirring lyrics, his Bread and the Newspaper, his oration on The Inevitable Trial, and his sketch of Motley's life, how generous was his affection for the nation but a great crisis brought these expressions to pass; his familiar habit of mind was cordially local. His affection fastened upon his college, and in his college on his class; he had a worthy pride in the race from which he had sprung, and the noble clannishness which is one of the safeguards of social morality; he loved the city of his life, not with the merely curious regard of the antiquary, but with the passion of the man who can be at home only in one place; and he held to New England as to a substantial entity, not a geographical section of some greater whole.

It would be a perversion of logic to say that all this was the result of condi

tions of life; that the hard-working medical professor must needs stay at home, especially when, for a large part of his academic career, his duties permitted no long vacation, so that, after the preliminary scamper over Europe which every young professional man was expected to make if he could, fifty years would elapse before the man, crowned with honors, should make a royal progress through England; that the lectures, again, before the medical school precluded those general lecturing tours which gave Emerson and others acquaintance with remoter parts of the country. Dr. Holmes had his little experience of the lyceum. A truer account would reverse cause and effect. He did not travel, because Boston and Nahant and Berkshire contented him. His laboratory was at hand; human nature was under his observation from the vantage-ground of home. With the instinct of a man of science, he took for analysis that which was most familiar to him, assured that in the bit of the world where he was born, and out of which he had got his nourishment, he had all he needed for the exercise of his wit.

He lived to see many changes in the large home to which he remained constant, and some of these changes were due to him. It may be doubted if any city so young as Boston ever acquired in its short life so distinct and self-centred a character. It is true that its founders brought with them a furnishing of customs, traditions, and ideas which gave the place at once a visionary ancestry of its own, and started it in life with a stock of notions; but the after life of the town down to the time when Holmes was a young man was singularly adapted to the creation of a personality such as is rare in modern times. With a very homogeneous population, a diversity of occupations, a commerce which gave its citizens

the sense of being in the centre of the world, a lively interest in politics and speculative theology which forbade intellectual stagnation, Boston was the head of a province, and had its own standards. So late as 1841, Mrs. Child could publish Letters from New York without raising a smile.

But when Dr. Holmes began his Breakfast-Table series in The Atlantic, the great migration from Ireland had been going on for ten years, clippers had given way before ocean steamships, New York was draining the Connecticut valley and the lower tier of New England States, manufacturers were establishing new centres of industrial interest, and political discussions were changing the centre of gravity from party to moral principle. The great westward movement, also, had drawn Boston capital and Boston men into new relations, and the old days of provincial security and selfcontent were coming to an end.

It was then that Dr. Holmes with one hand held up to view the society whose integrity was about to disappear, and with the other helped to construct the new order that was to take its place. There is no more pathetic yet kindly figure in our literature than Little Bos

With poetic instinct, Dr. Holmes made him deformed, but not ugly. He put into him a fiery soul of local patriotism, and transfigured him thus. Under the guise of a bit of nature's mockery he was enabled to give vent to a flood of feeling without arousing laughter or contempt. All Little Boston's vehemence of civic pride is a memorial inscription, and whatever may be the fortune of the city, however august may be its presence, there lies imbedded in this figure of Little Boston a perpetual witness to an imperishable civic form.

If Dr. Holmes concealed himself behind the mask of Little Boston, he was more frankly in evidence under the humorous conceit of the Autocrat, and the service which he rendered in this char

He knew

acter was an important one. a society in which theological discussion was still largely concerned with abstractions, and warfare was carried on under a set of rules which both parties recognized. Dr. Holmes used his wit not on one side or the other of prevailing controversies, though the conservative party undoubtedly regarded him as an assailant, but with the design of bringing to bear on fundamental questions that scientific spirit which was bred in him by his profession and penetrated by his genius. It was not so much the logic as the ingenuity, the wit, of science which he used to test a good many problems in spiritual life. He angered many at the time, but now that the heat of that day of discussions has gone down, it should be evident that Dr. Holmes had much more of the constructive temper than was then accredited to him, and that he was a poet dealing with fundamental things of the spirit, not a theologian. His good-natured raillery undermined conventions rather than sapped faith, and his wit was an acid which had no mordant power on that which was genuine. There were a good many shocks from his battery, but, after all, those who received the shocks were stung into a new vitality; and, taking his work by and large, it may be said to have had a tonic effect upon the society closest to it; a fresher breeze blew through the minds of men, and intellectual life was freer, more animated, and more on the alert.

This concentration of his power and his affection has had its effect on Dr. Holmes's literary fame. He is another witness, if one were needed, to the truth that identification with a locality is a surer passport to immortality than cosmopolitanism. The local is a good starting-point from which to essay the univer sal.

Thoreau perhaps affected a scorn of the world outside of Concord, but he helped make the little village a temple, and his statue is in one of the niches. Holmes, staying in Boston, has brought

the world to his door, and a society which is already historic will preserve him in its amber. It is the power to transmute the near and tangible into something of value the world over which is the mark of genius, and Holmes had this philosopher's stone.

The death of Holmes removes the last of those American writers who form the great group. This wit and poet lingered long enough to bid each in turn farewell. No doubt a longer perspective will enable us ultimately to adjust more perfectly their relations to one another and to the time, but it is not likely that there will be any serious revision of judgment by posterity as to their place in the canon. When Lowell went, Whittier and Holmes remained, and we kept on, in the spirit of Wordsworth's maiden, counting over the dead and the living in one inseparate company. Now they are all in the past tense, and all in the present; for death has a way of liberating personality, setting it free from accidents, and giving it permanent relations. There is thus a possession by the American people which, in a paradox, could not be theirs till they had lost it; they have lost out of sight the last member of the great group, and they have gained thereby in a clearer field of vision the whole group.

The significance of this will doubtless. be more measurable a generation hence than it is now, but an intimation of it is given in a parallel from the political world. We are enough removed from the great group of American statesmen who had to do with the foundation and fortification of our political order to recognize the very great interest which the American people take in their lives and their contribution to our polity. As they recede from the field of personal acquaintance they become more heroic, and stand for the great deeds and thoughts of an historic past. Research may increase the particularity of our acquaintance with their actions, but their charVOL. LXXIV. 53 - NO. 446.

acters are substantially fixed, and their images are formed in the minds of each successive generation; growing a little less actual, it may be, but charged constantly with greater power of transmitting the ideals for which they stood.

But

It is of inestimable value that the political thought of the early days of the republic should have its exponent in this noble group, and though that thought may be run into newer moulds, the characters that gave weight to the thought can never cease to have interest. after all, general as is the political consciousness of the people, it is not so comprehensive nor so constant as is the consciousness which deals more directly with conduct, and with the whole realm of the spirit; and the existence of a great group of men of letters, appearing as it were after the political foundations had been laid, may be regarded as an event of immeasurable importance. The men whom we have been considering have made their works the entrance way to the world of beauty for a whole people, and if we take into account the probability that in a few years the great body of literature read in the public schools of the nation will be the writings of Longfellow, Whittier, Hawthorne, Lowell, Emerson, Holmes, Bryant, and Irv ing, we may well reckon it of inestimable moment that these writings are charged with high ideals, free thought, purity, a noble love of nature and humanity, a passion of patriotism. Nor is it of scarcely less moment that when the boys and girls who have read these writings turn to the records of the lives of the writers, they will find simplicity of living, devotion to art, and high-minded service.

A common language is essential to anything like common life in the nation. The perils which beset us now in the industrial world are largely enhanced by the lack of a common intelligence of speech. But a common literature is essential to any true community of ideals; and in the work of producing a homoge

THE summer vacation, always a busy season for the artist, has come to be a period of activity for the writer as well. At every summer resort the portable inkstand is set up alongside of the easel, landscape and figures are transferred to foolscap as well as to canvas, and atmospheric effects are sought after as eagerly by the word-painter as by his brother of the brush. Mr. James Payn, whose volumes have accompanied many a summer tourist, in his autobiography drew a pathetic picture of the unhappy author, forced to work while other people were playing, and envying the bank clerk his yearly outing. But that was in the days when summer reading was produced in Grub Street by the sweat of the brow, and before the genre of summer writing was invented. If Mr. Payn had been a globe-trotter, an outdoor writer, or an idylist, he could have taken a holiday and turned it to account. If a complete rest is denied the weary quill-driver, he can at least vary the monotony of the service by driving a four-in-hand, or going to sea in a bowl, or by taking his readers to some mountain height and instructing them in the open air with less formality and strenuousness than in the study or laboratory. The readers, too, ought to be gainers; for if we cannot demand of holiday writers or travelers an achievement showing "the long results of time," we can at least look to them for novelty

1 The Real Japan. Studies of Contemporary Japanese Manners, Morals, Administration, and

of information, or for some fresh bit of impressionism in literary art.

In characterizing the somewhat miscellaneous group of travel and outdoor volumes before us as a holiday harvest, we have not the intention of implying that they are all the product of that easy writing said by Sheridan to be hard reading. Mr. Norman's book on Japan1 is the reverse of this. It represents considerable and efficient work in the accumulation of materials, and it is well written and thoroughly readable. Its chapters have been published, we are told, in English, French, and American journals, but they dovetail well and were well worth reprinting, their flavor of cosmopolitan journalism being for the most part thoroughly agreeable, though we confess to a shade of ennui on being called upon at every turn to admire the rare opportunities for information accorded to the author. We must take exception also to the title of the book, if not on behalf of those writers on Japan to whom we have hitherto felt indebted for information as well as pleasure, at least in the interest of readers of our own turn of mind, who may find that to have the whole truth thrust upon them in one pill is no more agreeable or reassuring in literature, or even journalism, than in dogma.

But when we are allowed to forget the finality and the price of the banquet set before us, we find Mr. Norman's book Politics. By HENRY NORMAN. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1894.