of age.  The personnel of the Breakfast Table series, such as the landlady and the landlady’s daughter and her son, Benjamin Franklin; the schoolmistress, the young man named John, the Divinity Student, the Kohinoor, the Sculpin, the Scarabaeus, and the Old Gentleman who sits opposite, are not fully drawn characters, but outlined figures, lightly sketched—­as is the Autocrat’s wont—­by means of some trick of speech, or dress, or feature, but they are quite life-like enough for their purpose, which is mainly to furnish listeners and foils to the eloquence and wit of the chief talker.

In 1860 and 1867 Holmes entered the field of fiction with two “medicated novels,” Elsie Venner and the Guardian Angel.  The first of these was a singular tale, whose heroine united with her very fascinating human attributes something of the nature of a serpent; her mother having been bitten by a rattlesnake a few months before the birth of the girl, and kept alive meanwhile by the use of powerful antidotes.  The heroine of the Guardian Angel inherited lawless instincts from a vein of Indian blood in her ancestry.  These two books were studies of certain medico-psychological problems.  They preached Dr. Holmes’s favorite doctrines of heredity and of the modified nature of moral responsibility by reason of transmitted tendencies which limit the freedom of the will.  In Elsie Venner, in particular, the weirdly imaginative and speculative character of the leading motive suggests Hawthorne’s method in fiction, but the background and the subsidiary figures have a realism that is in abrupt contrast with this, and gives a kind of doubleness and want of keeping to the whole.  The Yankee characters, in particular, and the satirical pictures of New England country life are open to the charge of caricature.  In the Guardian Angel the figure of Byles Gridley, the old scholar, is drawn with thorough sympathy, and though some of his acts are improbable, he is, on the whole, Holmes’s most vital conception in the region of dramatic creation.

James Russell Lowell (1819- ), the foremost of American critics and of living American poets, is, like Holmes, a native of Cambridge, and, like Emerson and Holmes, a clergyman’s son.  In 1855 he succeeded Longfellow as professor of modern languages in Harvard College.  Of late years he has held important diplomatic posts, like Everett, Irving, Bancroft, Motley, and other Americans distinguished in letters, having been United States minister to Spain, and, under two administrations, to the court of St. James.  Lowell is not so spontaneously and exclusively a poet as Longfellow, and his popularity with the average reader has never been so great.  His appeal has been to the few rather than the many, to an audience of scholars and of the judicious rather than to the “groundlings” of the general public.  Nevertheless his verse, though without the evenness, instinctive grace, and unerring good taste of Longfellow’s,