Curiously enough, the author of these lines lived to write an appreciative life of the poet who wrote the Sphinx.  There was a good deal of toryism or social conservatism in Holmes.  He acknowledged a preference for the man with a pedigree, the man who owned family portraits, had been brought up in familiarity with books, and could pronounce “view” correctly.  Readers unhappily not of the “Brahmin caste of New England” have sometimes resented as snobbishness Holmes’s harping on “family,” and his perpetual application of certain favorite shibboleths to other people’s ways of speech.  “The woman who calc’lates is lost.”

  “Learning condemns beyond the reach of hope
  The careless lips that speak of soap for soap. . . . 
  Do put your accents in the proper spot: 
  Don’t, let me beg you, don’t say ‘How?’ for ‘What?’
  The things named ‘pants’ in certain documents,
  A word not made for gentlemen, but ‘gents.’”

With the rest of “society” he was disposed to ridicule the abolition movement as a crotchet of the eccentric and the long-haired.  But when the civil war broke out he lent his pen, his tongue, and his own flesh and blood to the cause of the Union.  The individuality of Holmes’s writings comes in part from their local and provincial bias.  He has been the laureate of Harvard College and the bard of Boston city, an urban poet, with a cockneyish fondness for old Boston ways and things—­the Common and the Frog Pond, Faneuil Hall and King’s Chapel and the Old South, Bunker Hill, Long Wharf, the Tea Party, and the town crier.  It was Holmes who invented the playful saying that “Boston Statehouse is the hub of the solar system.”

In 1857 was started the Atlantic Monthly, a magazine which has published a good share of the best work done by American writers within the past generation.  Its immediate success was assured by Dr. Holmes’s brilliant series of papers, the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, 1858, followed at once by the Professor at the Breakfast Table, 1859, and later by the Poet at the Breakfast Table, 1873.  The Autocrat is its author’s masterpiece, and holds the fine quintessence of his humor, his scholarship, his satire, genial observation, and ripe experience of men and cities.  The form is as unique and original as the contents, being something between an essay and a drama; a succession of monologues or table-talks at a typical American boarding-house, with a thread of story running through the whole.  The variety of mood and thought is so great that these conversations never tire, and the prose is interspersed with some of the author’s choicest verse.  The Professor at the Breakfast Table followed too closely on the heels of the Autocrat, and had less freshness.  The third number of the series was better, and was pleasantly reminiscent and slightly garrulous, Dr. Holmes being now (1873) sixty-four years old, and entitled to the gossiping privilege