yond 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
State House 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 thirty years. Its immediate success was assured by Dr.
Holmes's brilliant series of papers, the {493} _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 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 name