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Professor Holmes is distinguished in materia medica as well as in lays and lyrics. He is familiar with the highways and byways of those
Realms unperfumed by the breath of song,
Where flowers ill-flavoured shed their sweets around,
And bitterest roots invade the ungenial ground,
Whose gems are crystals from the Epsom mine,
Whose vineyards flow with antimonial wine,
Whose gates admit no mirthful feature in,
Save one gaunt mocker, the Sardonic grin[1]—
and with rare devotion he pursues the sternly prosaic calls of the healing art—unable as his poetic temperament sometimes may be to repress a sigh for the beautiful, or a sonnet on the sublime, and, in passing disgust at the restraints of professional study, to ask himself,
Why dream I here within these caging walls,
Deaf to her voice while blooming Nature calls;
Peering and gazing with insatiate looks
Through blinding lenses, or in wearying books?[2]
But, resisting temptation, and cleaving with full purpose of heart to M.D. mysteries, with leech-like tenacity to the leech's functions, he secures a more stable place in medical annals than many a distinguished medico-literary brother, such as Goldsmith, or Smollett, or Akenside. Nor can the temptation have been slight, to one with so kindly a penchant towards the graces of good fellowship, and who can analyse with such sympathetic gusto what he calls "the warm, champagny, old-particular, brandy-punchy feeling"—and who may arrogate a special mastery of the
Quaint trick to cram the pithy line
That cracks so crisply over bubbling wine.
Evidently, too, he is perfectly alive to the pleasure and pride of social applause, and accepts the "three times three" of round-table glorification as rightly bestowed. Indeed, in more than one of his morçeaux, he plumes himself on a certain irresistible power of waggery, and even thinks it expedient to vow never to give his jocosity the full length of its tether, lest its side-shaking violence implicate him in unjustifiable homicide. His versification is smooth and finished, without being tame or strait-laced. He takes pains with it, because to the poet's paintings 'tis
Verse bestows the varnish and the frame—
and study, and a naturally musical ear, have taught him that
