says Doctor Holmes in his Phi Beta Kappa poem of 1881:
Our ancestors were dwellers beside the Zuyder Zee;
Both Grotius and Erasmus were countrymen of we,
And Vondel was our namesake, though he spelt it with a v.
Jacob Wendell became, eventually, one of the richest merchants of Boston; was a member of the City Council and colonel of the Boston regiment. His son, Oliver (the grandfather of Doctor Holmes), was born in 1733, and after his graduation at Harvard, in 1753, he went into business with his father. He still continued his studies, however, and preferring a professional life to that of a business man, he afterwards graduated at the Law School, was admitted to the bar, and soon after appointed Judge of Probate for Suffolk County. In Drake's Old Landmarks of Boston, we find that Judge Wendell was a selectman during the siege of Boston, and was commissioned by General Washington to raise a company of men to watch the British after the evacuation, so that no spies might pass between the two armies.
The original Bradstreet was Simon, the old Charter Governor, who married Governor Dudley's daughter Anne.[2] This accomplished lady, the first New England poetess, and frequently called by her contemporaries "The Tenth Muse," was Doctor Holmes' grandmother's great-great-grandmother.[3]
With such an ancestry, Oliver Wendell Holmes surely fulfils all the conditions of "a man of family," and who will not readily agree with the Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, when he writes as follows:
"I go for the man with the family portraits against the one with the twenty-five cent daguerreotype, unless I find out that the last is the better of the two. I go for the man that inherits family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least four or five generations. Above all things, as a child, he should have tumbled about in a library. All men are afraid of books that have not handled them from infancy."