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HOLMES

llfic author, and all his books were of a high moral tone. Some of the best known are Bitter-Sweet; Gold Foil; Arthur Bonni-castle; The Story of Sevenoaks; and Nicholas Minturn. He died at New York, Oct. 12, 1881.

Hol'ly, species of the genus Ilex, which contains about 175 species distributed throughout the world. They are ornamental shrubs with evergreen or deciduous and sometimes spiny leaves and black, red or yellow berries, which remain on the shrubs until the following spring. In this country holly is most abundant on the bottom-lands of the streams of eastern

HOLLY

Texas and southern Arkansas, but occurs on the Atlantic coast from Massachusetts to Florida; and in the valley of the Mississippi it is found from southern Indiana to the Gulf, in Mississippi and in Louisiana. The hollies with scarlet or red berries are regarded as the most ornamental, and the branches of /. opaca and /. aquifolium bearing red berries are in large demand for Christmas decoration. /. opaca, known as the American holly, is a tree sometimes 50 feet high. I. aquifolium is a favorite evergreen shrub in English gardens, and there are numerous varieties of it in cultivation, known as the European holly. It is native to Europe and Asia.

Hollyhock, an old garden-plant (Althcsa rosea) belonging to the mallow family. Numerous varieties of it have been developed, and it is one of the treasured "old-fashioned flowers." It comes originally from Syria. The double variety is taking the place formerly held by the single one and shows a wide range of color.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell. With our reading-tables crowded with periodicals of rich and varied contents and of wide circulation, it is difficult to realize that the launching of a literary magazine in the United States, fifty years ago, was looked upon as a hazardous undertaking. Public taste and confidence would have to be cultivated, and contributions, it was feared, imported. Where was The Atlantic Monthly to look for writers? Of poets we had a goodly number, and Lowell was to edit the magazine. But of prose-writers, Hawthorne was abroad in the consular service and was writing very little, and Washington Irving was within two years of his death. A number of younger writers had still to win their spurs. In this emergency Lowell appealed to Dr. Holmes, a Boston physician and medical lecturer at Harvard.

Born in Cambridge, Mass., Aug. 29, 1809, Oliver Wendell Holn.es was forty-eight years old. When in college more than a quarter of a century before, he had won fame over-night by writing Old Ironsides, a poem that got into the school-readers and saved the Constitution from destruction. He still wrote verse occasionally, and he had local celebrity as a conversationalist. His drawing-room talk and classroom lectures were said to be good enough to print. Lowell declared boldly: "The success of this magazine rests with Dr. Holmes. He has written little, but you'll see. His mind is like a bright mountain stream that has been dammed up in the hills, waiting only an outlet to the ocean. He has a wonderful store of thought — serious, comic, pathetic and poetic." The prediction was verified in that delightful series of essays, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. Nothing so wise, so witty, so humorous, so kindly, so philosophical, had been produced in America. English critics declared he had the flavor of Montaigne, the sweetness of Goldsmith, the high-bred fancy of Leigh Hunt and a moral freshness all his own — a boy-heart, unsullied, in a manly breast, beating true under a poet's robe.

The place he thus gained in the world of letters he continued to hold unchallenged to the day of his death, in October, 1894, at the age of eighty-five. The Professor at the Breakfast Table soon followed; then Elsie Venner, The Guardian Angel, The

OLIVER W. HOLMES