“THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE” appeared first as a series of essays in the Atlantic Monthly at a time (1858–59) when current American humor consisted almost wholly of the broadest and most farcical burlesque. Irving had written and had been much admired on English authority that he represented literary excellence of a high order, but the general circulation of his works consequent on the expiration of copyrights had not then begun. Popular taste was crude, and it was fed with crudity. A “Cyclopedia of Humor” of several hundred pages, published by one of the leading houses of the country in the year in which the “Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table” appeared, has in it hardly an example of American humor which rises above the taste of the circus ring-master. It is not strange under such circumstances that Dr. Holmes won immediate celebrity. He represented literary excellence, and, at the same time, much more of the real American spirit than is to be found in Irving’s imitation of Addison. Such poems as that in which Holmes tells the history of the “One-Hoss Shay” interspersed the prose in a way which has proven popular ever since it was invented several thousand years ago in Persia; and in these, as well as in the prose, was a “benignant vein of wit” delicate enough to be pleasing to the most refined, and yet broad enough to impress itself on those who require burnt cork with their humor and red fire with their tragedy. Dr. Holmes became thus the first real American humorist with an assured standing in good literature. He followed his first great success by “The Professor at the Breakfast-Table” and “The Poet at the Breakfast-Table,” as well as by poems, novels, and miscellaneous essays, all admirable in their way, but not capable singly or in mass of displacing him from the public mind in his original rôle of “Autocrat.” He had a true and fine ear for melody and all his verse shows it, but he will be remembered by his ode on “The Chambered Nautilus” when all the rest is forgotten. Born at Cambridge, Massachusetts, August 29th, 1809, he adopted medicine as a profession and followed it usefully until his death, October 7th, 1894, but his highest usefulness was in curing bad humor. New England has produced many greater propagandists and a number of greater thinkers, but no one whom the Americans of the coming century, north and south, east and west, are likely to love better as the representative of all that is best in New England good-nature.