Books: Holmes's Heir

HOLMES OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE—M. A. DeWolfe Howe—Oxford Universify Press ($2.50).

In a Beacon Hill drawing room one Saturday afternoon in 1893 an awed young man was introduced in a loud voice to a tiny, asthmatic, homely oldster. The young man was Mark Antony DeWolfe Howe, 29, recently made assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly. The old man was Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, wittiest man of his day, unofficial Boston poet laureate, last surviving petal of the literary flowering of New England. By the next autumn, feeling "like my own survivor," Dr. Holmes had...