THE "BREAKFAST-TABLE" SERIES The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table INTRODUCTION. DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES is essentially what is termed a "funny fellow." He is one of the "funniest fellows" to be found, perhaps, in his native town of Boston and his native state of Massachusetts, which is saying a good deal; for in that grim, starched, intolerant, Puritanical country called New England a good deal more fun than you are aware of may be found, by those who seek for it, slyly lurking. A well-to-do, well-reputed, easy-going physician, Dr. Holmes has been for a long time, I take it, exempt from the cares of an actually bread-winning literary life, and can know but little of that "eternal want of pence which vexes public men." He is one of that select cénacle who are to be found at the gatherings of the old alumni of Harvard, and, occasionally, in the umbrageous groves of Messrs. Ticknor and Fields' book-store in Washington Street, Boston. An illustrious knot they form: Longfellow and Emerson; Whittier and Whipple; Holmes and Lowell, and Agassiz-all the beaux esprits of the Atlantic Monthly, in a word, with an appropriate Coryphæus in the person of Mr. James T. Fields, himself a ripe scholar, a poet of no mean order, and a funny fellow" to boot; for he possesses a rich collection of New-England witticisms and Yankee drolleries. Dr. Holmes's Autocrat of the BreakfastTable has long been favourably known as a series of essays 66 |