_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 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