I tell you there was generous warmth in good old English cheer,
I tell you 'twas a pleasant thought to bring its symbol here!
'Tis but the fool that loves excess; hast thou a drunken soul,
The fault is in thy shallow brain, not in my silver bowl.
This, indeed, may remind us that the everlasting 'boy' in Holmes is not to be confounded with the young of the human species as known to us by actual experience. The real boy is sometimes a brute, who loves boxing and the punchbowl after the manner of brutes. Holmes's boyishness means the actual possession of such qualities as are attributed to boys—rashly sometimes—by loving mothers; the perfect simplicity, the confiding trustfulness of a nature which has not been soured into cynicism; and the confident assumption that their own happiness implies the general goodness of all their fellow-creatures. Holmes's early revolt against Calvinism had left to him, as I have said, the belief that a Calvinist was a really good man with an offensive dogma floating on the surface of his mind. His heretical outbursts might be taken in good part by the judicious, because they remind even the orthodox
