Arbuthnot, an ornament of the Augustan age. He shared
with the English Augustans a liking for the rhymed couplet, an
instinctive social sense, a feeling for the presence of an
imaginary audience of congenial listeners. One still catches the
"Hear! Hear!" between his clever lines. In many of the traits of
his mind this "Yankee Frenchman" resembled such a typical
eighteenth century figure as Voltaire. Like Voltaire, he was
tolerant--except toward Calvinism and Homeopathy. In some of the
tricks of his prose style he is like a kindlier Sterne. His knack
for vers de societe was caught from Horace, but he would not have
been a child of his own age without the additional gift of
rhetoric and eloquence which is to be seen in his patriotic poems
and his hymns. For Holmes possessed, in spite of all his
limitations in poetic range, true devotion, patriotism, humor,
and pathos.
His poetry was in the best sense of the word "occasional," and
his prose was only an incidental or accidental harvest of a long
career in which his chief duty was that of a professor of anatomy
in the Harvard Medical School.
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