Mr. Samuel Weller33 I should ask as Lord of Misrule, and Dr. Johnson as the Abbot of Unreason. I would suggest to Major Dobbin34 to accompany Mrs. Fry;35 Alcibiades 36 would bring Homer and Plato in his purple-sailed galley; and I would have Aspasia,37 Ninon de l'Enclos, 38 and Mrs. Battle,39 to make up a table of whist with Queen Elizabeth. I shall order a seat placed in the oratory for Lady Jane Grey and Joan of Arc. I shall invite General Washington to bring some of the choicest cigars from his plantation for Sir Walter Raleigh; and Chaucer, Browning, and Walter Savage Landor should talk with Goethe, who is to bring Tasso on one arm and Iphigenia10 on the other.

Dante and Mr. Carlyle11 would prefer, I suppose, to go down into the dark vaults under the castle. The Man in the Moon, the Old Harry, and William of the Wisp would be valuable additions, and the Laureate Tennyson might compose an official ode upon the occasion: or I would ask "They" to say all about it.

Of course there are many other guests whose names I do not at the moment recall. But I should invite, first of all, Miles

33. Mr. Samuel Weller. One of the chief characters in Dickens's Pickwick Papers. The Lord of Misrule was the director of the Christmas sports at old English festivals. The Abbot of Unreason was a similar title, used in Scotland.

34. Major Dobbin. Another character in Vanity Fair.

35. Mrs. Fry. An English Friend or Quakeress (died 1845), distinguished for her work in prison reform,

36. Alcibiades. A young Athenian politician; friend of Socrates. 37. Aspasia An Athenian beauty, beloved of Pericles.

38. Ninon de l'Enclos. A beauty of the French salons of the late seventeenth century.

39. Mrs. Battle. A character described by Lamb in his essay called "Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist."

40. Tasso Iphigenia. The Italian poet and the ancient Greek heroine were the subjects of dramatic poems of Goethe's. 41. Dante and Mr. Carlyle. Curtis assigns these characters to the lower regions in the one case because of Dante's authorship of the Inferno, in the other because of Carlyle's reputation for a morose or gloomy view of the world.

Coverdale,1 ,42 who knows everything about these places and this society, for he was at Blithedale, and he has described “a select party" which he attended at a castle in the air.

Prue has not yet looked over the list. In fact I am not quite sure that she knows my intention. For I wish to surprise her, and I think it would be generous to ask Bourne to lead her out in the bridal quadrille. I think that I shall try the first waltz with the girl I sometimes seem to see in my fairest castle, but whom I very vaguely remember. Titbottom will come with old Burton13 and Jaques. But I have not prepared half my invitations. Do you not guess it, seeing that I did not name, first of all, Elia, who assisted at the "Rejoicings upon the new year's coming of age" ?44

And yet, if Adoniram should never marry? or if we could not get to Spain?-or if the company would not come? What then? Shall I betray a secret? I have already entertained this party in my humble little parlor at home; and Prue presided as serenely as Semiramis15 over her court. Have I not said that I defy time, and shall space hope to daunt me? I keep books by day, but by night books keep me. They leave me to dreams and reveries. Shall I confess that sometimes when I have been sitting reading to my Prue, Cymbeline,46 perhaps, or a Canterbury Tale, I have seemed to see clearly before me the broad highway to my castles in Spain; and as she looked up from her work, and smiled in sympathy, I have even fancied that I was already there.

42. Miles Coverdale. A character in Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance, supposed in part to represent Hawthorne's own personality. Blithedale was the scene of a philosophic colony, sketched after that at Brook Farm, where Hawthorne spent some time as well as Curtis; this is the "castle in the air."

century,

43. Burton. A quaint writer of the seventeenth author of The Anatomy of Melancholy. This allies him with Jaques, the melancholy gentleman of As You Like It.

44. Rejoicings, etc. One of Lamb's Elia Essays, 1821.

45. Semiramis. Ancient Queen of Assyria.

46. Cymbeline. One of Shakespeare's romantic plays.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

[OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1809. He was graduated from Harvard in the class of 1829,a class remembered especially by a series of class poems which he wrote for successive anniversaries. He studied medicine, and in 1847 became Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in the Harvard Medical School, remaining on the faculty for thirty-five years. Very early he attained some reputation as a poet, and when The Atlantic Monthly magazine was founded in 1857, he became its leading prose contributor; indeed his papers, "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," are sometimes said to have been the chief cause of the prompt success of the new periodical. Later series, sequels to the first, dealt with the Poet and the Professor at the breakfast-table. Dr. Holmes was famous as a brilliant conversationalist, and in his Breakfast-Table papers he was often doing little more than developing in written form actual conversations between himself and his friends. He was one of the most genial and best beloved of the circle of writers which in the third quarter of the nineteenth century made Boston and Cambridge famous in the world of letters. Leading an active life, both physical and intellectual, almost to the last, he died in 1894.]

BOATING1.

A YOUNG friend has lately written an admirable article in one of the journals, entitled, "Saints and their Bodies." Approving of his general doctrines, and grateful for his records

1. This essay is a part of one of the Autocrat papers (the seventh), in which the Professor reads an essay on old age, and thus is led to discuss the forms of exercise that remain desirable for those past their youth. The author is representing his own life and opinions very definitely, and, though the Professor is an older man than Holmes was at this time (1858), yet he anticipates his own actual later years; for he kept up his active boating habits to an advanced age. His home was near the Back Bay, the shallow basin into which the Charles River originally widened between East Cambridge and Boston; and there are those still living who remember seeing him row up stream to the Cambridge shore, where stood (and still stands) the Riverside Press, at which the Atlantic was printed, in order to correct the proofsheets of his articles. Since those days the Back Bay has been largely filled in with made land, built up with an important new residential district of Boston; so that one can no longer moor river boat at the edge of the Common or the Public Garden, as Holmes speaks of doing in the essay. The opening sentence refers to an essay by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in the Atlantic for March, 1858.

a

of personal experience, I cannot refuse to add my own experi mental confirmation of his eulogy of one particular form of active exercise and amusement, namely, boating. For the past nine years I have rowed about, during a good part of the summer, on fresh or salt water. My present fleet on the River Charles consists of three row-boats. 1. A small flat-bottomed skiff in the shape of a flat-iron, kept mainly to lend to boys. 2. A fancy "dory" for two pairs of sculls, in which I sometimes go out with my young folks. 3. My own particular water-sulky, a "skeleton" or "shell" race-boat, twenty-two feet long, with huge outriggers, which boat I pull with ten-foot sculls, alone, of course, as it holds but one, and tips him out if he doesn't mind what he is about. In this I glide around the Back Bay, down the stream, up the Charles to Cambridge and Watertown, up the Mystic,2 round the wharves, in the wake of steamboats, which leave a swell after them delightful to rock upon; I linger under the bridges, those "caterpillar bridges," as my brother professor so happily called them; rub against the black sides of old wood-schooners; cool down under the overhanging stern of some tall Indiaman; stretch across to the Navy Yard, where the sentinel warns me off from the Ohio,-just as if I should hurt her by lying in her shadow; then strike out into the harbor, where the water gets clear and the air smells of the ocean,-till all at once I remember that, if a west wind blows up of a sudden, I shall drift along past the islands, out of sight of the dear old State-house,-plate, tumbler, knife and fork all waiting at home, but no chair drawn up at the table,-all the dear people waiting, waiting, waiting, while the boat is sliding, sliding, sliding into the great desert, where there is no tree and no fountain. As I don't want my wreck to be washed

2. the Mystic. The Mystic River unites with the Charles at Charlestown, and they flow together into Boston harbor.

3. Indiaman. Formerly the common name for a freight vessel that sailed to the Orient.

2

up on one of the beaches in company with devil's-aprons,* bladder-weeds, dead horse-shoes, and bleached crab-shells, I turn about and flap my long, narrow wings for home. When the tide is running out swiftly, I have a splendid fight to get through the bridges, but always make it a rule to beat,though I have been jammed up into pretty tight places at times, and was caught once between a vessel swinging round and the pier, until our bones (the boat's, that is) cracked as if we had been in the jaws of Behemoth. Then back to my moorings at the foot of the Common, off with the rowingdress, dash under the green translucent wave, return to the garb of civilization, walk through my Garden,' take a look at my elms on the Common, and, reaching my habitat, in consideration of my advanced period of life, indulge in the Elysian abandonment of a huge recumbent chair.

When I have established a pair of well-pronounced feathering-calluses on my thumbs, when I am in training so that I can do my fifteen miles at a stretch without coming to grief in any way, when I can perform my mile in eight minutes or a little more, then I feel as if I had old Time's head in chancery, and could give it to him at my leisure.

I do not deny the attraction of walking. I have bored this ancient city through and through in my travels, until I know it as an old inhabitant of a Cheshire knows his cheese. Why, it was I who, in the course of these rambles, discovered that remarkable avenue called Myrtle Street, stretching in one long line from east of the Reservoir to a precipitous and rudely paved cliff which looks down on the grim abode of

4. devil's-aprons. Sea-mosses of a familiar species.
5. horse-shoes. Horse-shoe crabs.

6. Behemoth. A sea-monster of Hebrew literature (see Job 40:15, where it probably is a name for the hippopotamus); Holmes may be using the term for a whale.

7. my Garden. The Public Garden, adjoining Boston Common. 8. in chancery. Under my arm (a pugilistic position).

9. old inhabitant.

That is, a cheese-mite.