Rather than simply summarizing here what we have said earlier in this study about Doctor Holmes in the conversation of his antebellum American culture, it might be most useful, in this brief conclusion, to take a step outside of the Doctor's social circles and out of his era, as a way of beginning to situate and to evaluate his achievements, to get some sense of the larger ramifications of his conversational ideal. We do not have to look further than Holmes' own household to find a perfect foil, for his son was a writer who developed out of and in reaction to the Doctor's verbal world. The distinctive literary style and stance of Justice Holmes – which made him one of the most representative voices of postbellum America – arose out of a strained lifelong “conversation” with his father, a conversation reflecting fundamental differences about the workings of conversation. If Doctor Holmes always urged the opening of conversation, we will see that Justice Holmes, while he grew up within the conversation defined by his father, finally became preoccupied with “the statement of conclusions,” and thus developed a series of new strategies for closing this conversation. Perhaps we have lost an important sense of how difficult it must have been for an extraordinarily ambitious young man to grow up in midnineteenth-century Boston – or anywhere in mid-century America – with the name of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junior.