INTRODUCTION. DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES is essentially what is termed a " funny fellow." He is one of the "funniest fellows” to be found, perhaps, in his native town of Boston and his native state of Massachusetts, which is saying a good deal; for in that grim, starched, intolerant, Puritanical country called New England a good deal môre'fun than you are aware of may be found, by those who seek for it, slyly lurking. A well-to-do, well-reputed, easy-going physician, Dr. Holmes has been for a long time, I take it, exempt from the cares of an actually bread-winning literary life, and can know but little of that “eternal want of pence which vexes public men.” He is one of that select cénacle who are to be found at the gatherings of the old alumni of Harvard, and, occasionally, in the umbrageous groves of Messrs. Ticknor and Fields' book-store in Washington Street, Boston. An illustrious knot they form : Longfellow and Emerson ; Whittier and Whipple; Holmes and Lowell, and Agassiz—all the beaux esprits of the Atlantic Monthly, in a word, with an appropriate Coryphæus in the person of Mr. James T. Fields, himself a ripe scholar, a poet of no mean order, and a funny fellow" to boot; for he possesses a rich collection of New-England witticisms and Yankee drolleries. Dr. Holmes's Autocrat of the BreakfastTable has long been favourably known as a series of essays abounding in thoughtful and kindly humour, and keen observation of men, manners, and things. His humour, perhaps, is more thoroughly English than that of any of his contemporaries; and this is most strongly exemplified in his poems. The “Wonderful One-Hoss Shay," and the “ Height of the Ridiculous," might be enshrined among George Colman's “Broad Grins,"— it being perfectly well understood, however, that they are free from the coarseness with which those same “Broad Grins" are disfigured. Less subtle, less sardonic, less witty, perhaps, than Mr. Lowell—less quaint and droll than Artemus Ward,-Dr. Holmes's productions are mainly distinguished by their simple, genial comicality. He does not make you sigh even while you laugh : and he does not make you ask yourself why you laugh at all. You laugh at him just as you would at a droll face or a comic picture. GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA, AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. I. I WAS just going to say, when I was interrupted, that one of arithmetical and algebraical intellects. All economical and practical wisdom is an extension or variation of the following arithmetical formula : 2+2=4. Every philosophical proposition has the more general character of the expression, a+b=c. We are mere operatives, empirics, and egotists, until we learn to think in letters instead of figures. They all stared. There is a divinity student lately come among us to whom I commonly address remarks like the above, allowing him to take a certain share in the conversation, so far as assent or pertinent questions are involved. He abused his liberty on this occasion by presuming to say that Leibnitz had the same observation.—No, sir, I replied, he has not. But he said a mighty good thing about mathematics, that sounds something like it, and you found it, not in the original, but quoted by Dr. Thomas Reid. I will tell the company what he did say, one of these days. If I belong to a Society of Mutual Admiration ?-I blush to say that I do not at this present moment. I once did, however. It was the first association to which I ever heard the term applied ; a body of scientific young men in a great foreign city, |