Dr. Holmes was a New Englander, and born in what he calls “the Brahmin caste,” the class which, in England, before the sailing of the May Flower, and ever since, had always been literary and highly educated.  “I like books; I was born and bred among them,” he says, “and have the easy feeling, when I get into their presence, that a stable-boy has among horses.”  He is fond of books, and, above all, of old books—­strange, old medical works, for example—­full of portents and prodigies, such as those of Wierus.

New England, owing to its famous college, Harvard, and its steady maintenance of the literary and learned tradition among the clergy, was, naturally, the home of the earliest great American school of writers.  These men—­Longfellow, Lowell, Ticknor, Prescott, Hawthorne, and so many others—­had all received the same sort of education as Europeans of letters used to receive.  They had not started as printers’ devils, or newspaper reporters, or playwrights for the stage, but were academic.  It does not matter much how a genius begins—­as a rural butcher, or an apothecary, or a clerk of a Writer to the Signet.  Still, the New Englanders were academic and classical.  New England has, by this time, established a tradition of its literary origin and character.  Her children are sons of the Puritans, with their independence, their narrowness, their appreciation of comfort, their hardiness in doing without it, their singular scruples of conscience, their sense of the awfulness of sin, their accessibility to superstition.  We can read of the later New Englanders in the making, among the works of Cotton Mather, his father Increase Mather, and the witch-burning, periwig-hating, doctrinal Judge Sewall, who so manfully confessed and atoned for his mistake about the Salem witches.  These men, or many of them, were deeply-learned Calvinists, according to the standard of their day, a day lasting from, say, the Restoration to 1730.  Cotton Mather, in particular, is erudite, literary—­nay, full of literary vanity—­mystical, visionary, credulous to an amusing degree.

But he is really as British as Baxter, or his Scottish correspondent and counterpart, Wodrow.  The sons or grandsons of these men gained the War of Independence.  Of this they are naturally proud, and the circumstance is not infrequently mentioned in Dr. Holmes’s works.  Their democracy is not roaring modern democracy, but that of the cultivated middle classes.  Their stern Calvinism slackened into many “isms,” but left a kind of religiosity behind it.  One of Dr. Holmes’s mouthpieces sums up his whole creed in the two words Pater Noster.  All these hereditary influences are consciously made conspicuous in Dr. Holmes’s writings, as in Hawthorne’s.  In Hawthorne you see the old horror of sin, the old terror of conscience, the old dread of witchcraft, the old concern about conduct, converted into aesthetic sources of literary pleasure, of literary effects.