Honourable Justice: The Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes by Sheldon M. Novick (review)

Shorter Book Reviews 403 American uniqueness, becomes the inexhaustible desire for closeness with the divine. I find DelBanco's main argument powerfully convincing; its graceful and generally clear expression furthers its persuasiveness. He gives particular topics perceptive treatment--the career of John Cotton, Puritan motives for migration, the beliefs of Hutchinson and James Davenport, to name but a few. The organizing themes of loss, sin, and the nature of the immigrant experience provide clear and suggestive reference points. The rather narrow thematic focus of the work does create certain problems, however. Issues of polity and doctrine, for instance, are underplayed, and while the notes reflect a command of the literature of social history, this material is not always successfully interwoven into the text. To be sure, this is a literary study; but ideas too often emerge in an historical vacuum, or as excerpts from the works of a select few. In an evidentiary sense, this is largely a book about the thoughts of a few ministers from Massachusetts. It is, however, a brilliantly-written, suggestive work that plumbs the depths of the trans-Atlantic Puritan experience. Ronald P. Du/our Department of History Rhode Island College Sheldon M. Novick, Honourable Justice: The Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1989. 512 pp. Illus. No Supreme Court Justice has placed so indelible a stamp on American jurisprudence as the New England aristocrat, Oliver Wendell Holmes. He was the "Magnificent Yankee" celebrated in a Broadway play, and the "Yankee from Olympus" of Catherine Drinker Bowen's hagiography. Benjamin Cardoza thought him among the greatest judges of the ages; Edmund Wilson considered him a master of English literature. Successive generations of law students cut their teeth on Holmes's The Common Law, and his judicial opinions, particularly his vigorous dissents, continue to be respectfully cited. It is curious that this is the first full biography of Holmes, although there were prior attempts. Felix Frankfurter was named the authorized biographer and given exclusive access to the Holmes papers. However, Frankfurter's work on the Supreme Court required him to pass the task to 404 Shorter Book Reviews his protege, Mark DeWolfe Howe. After thirty years' work, Howe died in 1967with only a third of a biography completed. The Yale professor, Grant Gilmore, then laboured at it for fifteen years until his death. Finally Sheldon Novick,a practicing Vermont attorney, has completed the task. Holmes lived to be almost ninety-four years old. He wrote more than 2000 opinions, three books, and voluminous reviews, diaries and letters (five volumes of his letters have been published). Novick has diligently plunged into this mountain, emerging occasionally with a genuine nugget--for example, the fact that Holmes's father (the imperious author of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table) had spent one unhappy year at Harvard Law School before switching to medicine. After three years as a young soldier in the Civil War, Holmes entered Harvard Law School in October, 1864. It is sobering to note that the faculty of the most prestigious American law school then totalled three in number, all practicing attorneys who maintained an active law practice. The curriculum was an unconnected study of (mostly private law) precedents. There were few texts and almost no theoretical studies exploring the linkages among subject areas (except for the recent publication of Henry Sumner Maine's Ancient Law which generated considerable excitement). Holmes filled this void with The Common Law, published when he was forty; thenceforth, with a brief stop to teach law at his alma mater, his career was a steady ascent to the pinnacle of the U.S. Supreme Court. For many years, Holmes's practice, during the Court's long summer vacation, was to decamp for England, leaving behind his sickly wife, Fanny. He would put up at MacKellar's Hotel in London and busy himself in a round of flirtatious social engagements with a bevy of English spinsters, widows and married women. At least one of these flirtations (with Lady Castleton) blossomed into a passionate infatuation; when Holmes returned to the United States, he wrote her a stream of letters, some written on the Bench, where the learned judge gave every appearance...