social occasions: his verses on class reunions and other personal celebrations entitle him to be called a great occasional poet. He is, therefore, a notable singer of friendship and loyalty in graceful, tuneful, witty verse, in which the head never triumphs at the expense of the heart.

His Prose. The prose works of Holmes, aside from his medical writings, consist of the "Breakfast Table" series and other personal narrative-talks, three novels, and two biographies.

The famous "Breakfast Table" series consists of three volumes-The Autocrat, The Professor, and The Poet. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1857) is a loose, personal essaynarrative on the sayings and doings at an imaginary boardinghouse breakfast table in Boston. The work is mostly a conversational monologue by the Autocrat himself, with just enough talk by the other boarders to give an air of naturalness to the scene. The Autocrat discourses in an entertaining vein on all sorts of subjects-mutual admiration societies, genius, the essentials of good conversation, specialists, puns, poetry, old age, theology. Excellent short poems vary the monotony, and a little love story helps to give unity to the book. You may dip into it anywhere and find something to interest and instruct you. It is full of wise comment and sparkling epigram. Here, for instance, are several sentences chosen at random:

Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used till they are seasoned.

Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way,—and the fools know it.

Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.

It is by little things that we know ourselves; a soul would very probably mistake itself for another, when once disembodied, were it not

for individual experiences which differ from those of others only in details seemingly trifling.

The clergy rarely hear any sermons except what they preach themselves. A dull preacher might be conceived, therefore, to lapse into a state of quasi heathenism, simply for want of religious instruction.

The Autocrat contains Holmes's best talk. Many of the striking sayings had no doubt been actually used by him at Boston dinner tables. In the two succeeding books, The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1859) and The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872), the good talk goes on, but with less spontaneity and variety than in the first volume. "The first pressing of the grapes," as he called it, naturally resulted in a more sparkling effect. The Professor is a little heavy and didactic, but The Poet, written twelve years later, shows more of the pleasing qualities of the earliest work. Holmes was forty-eight when he contributed The Autocrat papers to the Atlantic Monthly and found a new outlet for his genius; he was over eighty when Over the Tea Cups was finished. These evening talks, which also appeared in the Atlantic, are cheerful and kindly, spiced with wit and mellowed with the wisdom that wide experience and enduring friendships had brought. Despite their reminiscent and subdued tone, however, they reveal Holmes's keen interest in new problems. It was simply impossible for him to grow old mentally.

While Holmes's reputation as a prose writer depends upon the "Breakfast Table" series, passing mention must be made of the three novels-Elsie Venner, The Guardian Angel, and A Mortal Antipathy. These stories are concerned with questions of heredity and moral responsibility. Elsie Venner's mother was bitten by a rattlesnake before the child's birth, and the daughter shows the effects of it in a strange, nonhuman element in her nature. In The Guardian Angel the power of certain hereditary tendencies is traced. Miles Gridley in this book is the most attractive of Holmes's charac

ters. A Mortal Antipathy is the story of the rescue of a young man, ill with typhoid fever, from a burning building by an athletic college girl and the curing in him of a long and deepseated aversion to her sex. The first two novels are the best, though neither is a great book. So permeated with medical knowledge are these three novels, that a friend of the author aptly called them "medicated fiction."

Holmes wrote a memoir of the historian, John Lothrop Motley, and a biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Both were his friends and are treated in a sympathetic and charming manner, though Holmes was temperamently unable to understand the transcendental side of Emerson's nature.

It is likely that posterity will think of Holmes as the author of a handful of clever poems and of one exceedingly readable prose work, The Autocrat. There is nothing else in American literature just like that delightful, chatty book. It suggests Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Lamb's Essays of Elia, and Christopher North's Noctes Ambrosianae, but it is different from all these English classics. The "Breakfast Table" series has a flavor all its own. It is an original contribution to literature. In this pellucid prose a genial, witty, richly cultured gentleman of infallible taste and kindly human heart perfectly revealed himself to his fellowmen.

THE HISTORIANS AND THE ORATORS

History and oratory belong to literature when, by reason of the artistic style and pleasing personality of writer and speaker, they make a permanent appeal to the imagination and the emotions. Much historical writing has no literary quality; facts are set forth in a dry way, scientifically accurate but without illuminating grace or dramatic effect. The main things to be desired in a history are, of course, accuracy and clearness of statement, based on painstaking investigation. Now and then, however, a man of literary sensibility, with a

genius for graphic narration and description, writes history with such brilliancy and intensity that in addition to its scientific value it possesses literary merit. We find this combination, for instance, in Gibbon, the English historian; and also in Macaulay and Carlyle, though the one is sometimes over brilliant and the other over dramatic. The New England historians of literary interest are Prescott, Bancroft, Motley, Parkman, and Fiske.

Most public speeches perish after the causes which they advocate have triumphed or failed; they are not interesting to newer generations. Occasionally, however, a speaker deals in so vital and artistic a manner with some fundamental principle in the life of a nation, such as liberty or love of country, that what he says makes a permanent appeal to the hearts of men. Such a speech becomes a part of literature. Among the New England orators of this period only one is universally recognized as a great classic, and that is Daniel Webster; others, still famous but of lessening renown, are Choate, Sumner, Everett, and Phillips. We may now rapidly consider the principal New England historians and orators.

The Historians

George Bancroft (1800-1891).-George Bancroft was born at Worcester, Massachusetts, educated at Harvard, from which he graduated in 1817, and at the University of Goettingen, Germany, from which he received the degree of doctor of philosophy in 1820. After tutoring in Greek a year at Harvard, he helped to found a school at Northampton, and while teaching there published a small volume of poems. Later on, he held several official positions, serving as Secretary of the Navy under President Polk and as minister to England and to Germany. From 1849 to his death in 1891 his home was in New York.

In 1834 Bancroft published the first volume of his monumental History of the United States. To the completion of this

great work he devoted the best energies of his life for fifty years. It is in twelve volumes, covering the history of the country from the discovery of America to the adoption of the Constitution in 1788. Seven volumes are given to the American Revolution, and the last two to the formation of the Constitution. Bancroft was a painstaking investigator and a lucid writer, but his fondness for digressions and his almost excessive patriotism sometimes break the unity and injure the perspective of his work. Moreover, his style, particularly in the earlier volumes, is somewhat inflated; this defect, which is less noticeable in the latter part, was due to his desire to adapt his language to the stateliness of his theme. His history is a monument to American scholarship. Bancroft was a pioneer in that newer, scientific historical method in which Jared Sparks, Professor of History in Harvard College from 1839 to 1849, led the way. Sparks was really the founder in America of the modern historical school.

William H. Prescott (1796-1859).-William Hickling Prescott was born in Salem, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard. While in college he lost the sight of one eye from an accident (he was struck by a piece of bread thrown by a fellow student at table), and was threatened with total blindness. In spite of the handicap of such an affliction, he decided to devote his life to historical writing. Fortunately, he was independent financially and could, therefore, employ copyists to visit the countries whose history he wished to write, and make records of important documents. These were generally read to him, for he could use his eyes in reading only a little while at a time, and with the help of his secretary he wrote out his few pages daily. He worked in a darkened room, used an instrument called a noctograph to guide his hand over the paper, and by careful diet and exercise conserved his strength in order that what little eyesight he had left might not be lost. His patient labor at his task under such an infirmity is, in the light of his great achievement, one of the heroisms of literature.