Transcribed from the 1873 James R. Osgood and Company edition,
THE
AUTOCRAT
OF
THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.
EVERY MANHIS OWN BOSWELL.
BOSTON:
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY,
Late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields,Osgood, & Co.
1873.
Entered according to Act ofCongress, in the year 1858, by
Oliver Wendell Holmes,
In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the Districtof Massachusetts.
THE AUTOCRAT’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
The interruption referred to in the first sentence of thefirst of these papers was just a quarter of a century induration.
Two articles entitled “The Autocrat of theBreakfast-Table” will be found in the “New EnglandMagazine,” formerly published in Boston by J. T. and E.Buckingham. The date of the first of these articles isNovember 1831, and that of the second February 1832. When“The Atlantic Monthly” was begun, twenty-five yearsafterwards, and the author was asked to write for it, therecollection of these crude products of his uncombed literaryboyhood suggested the thought that it would be a curiousexperiment to shake the same bough again, and see if the ripefruit were better or worse than the early windfalls.
So began this series of papers, which naturally brings thoseearlier attempts to my own notice and that of some few friendswho were idle enough to read them at the time of theirpublication. The man is father to the boy that was, and Iam my own son, as it seems to me, in those papers of the NewEngland Magazine. If I find it hard to pardon theboy’s faults, others would find it harder. They willnot, therefore, be reprinted here, nor as I hope, anywhere.
But a sentence or two from them will perhaps bear reproducing,and with these I trust the gentle reader, if that kind beingstill breathes, will be contented.
—“It is a capital plan to carry atablet with you, and, when you find yourself felicitous, takenotes of your own conversation.”—
—“When I feel inclined to read poetry I take downmy Dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful asthat of sentences. The author may arrange the gemseffectively, but their fhape and luftre have been given by theattrition of ages. Bring me the fineft fimile from thewhole range of imaginative writing, and I will fhow you a fingleword which conveys a more profound, a more accurate, and a moreeloquent analogy.”—
—“Once on a time, a notion was ftarted, that ifall the people in the world would fhout at once, it might beheard in the moon. So the projectors agreed it fhould bedone in juft ten years. Some thousand fhip-loads ofchronometers were diftributed to the selectmen and other greatfolks of all the different nations. For a year beforehand,nothing else was talked about but the awful noise that was to bemade on the great occafion. When the time came, everybodyhad their ears so wide open, to hear the universal ejaculation ofBoo,—the word agreedupon,—that nobody spoke except a deaf man in one of theFejee Islands, and a woman in Pekin, so that the world was neverso ftill fince the creation.”—
There was nothing better than these things and ther