ABSTRACT
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. made of his letters a minor art. He was not a voluminous and certainly not an indiscriminate letter writer. In a letter from Berlin written in 1868 in reply to the first letter from Holmes printed below, James gives a glimpse of how deeply moved he was by his friendship. The story of the letters to Sir Frederick Pollock is of a very different sort. The letters are highly literary, casual but with a finished casualness. The themes of the letters are what one might expect from the preoccupations of two men who are lawyers, scholars, men-of-letters. The volumes of Holmes-Pollock letters will be most a treasuretrove to those who are interested in criticism. Holmes's letters to Wu were first published in the Chinese Ti'en Hsia Monthly in 1935. Holmes was an economic conservative, although the unthinking at times thought of him as a dangerous radical.
