BOOKS.

THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.

THERE was no incident in the late Mary Russell Mitford's visit to America which so surprised and delighted her as her discovery of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes of Boston, physician, poet, wit, and humourist. She printed in her " Literary Recollections " the whole of his " Lines on Lending a Silver Punch Bowl," a charm- ing melange of humour, tenderness, and manly feeling, and many of her readers were induced by her cordial notice of the author to make themselves more fully acquainted with his, works. Still he remained but very partially known to readers on this aide of the Atlantic until the publication, a year or two ago, of an English edition of his Autocrat of the Breakfast- Table, of which the pre- sent work is a continuation. Thenceforth it was a fact beyond dispute in this country, as well as in the United StateS, that there existed in the latter a rightful successor to the supremacy there in wit and humour, which Washington Irving was about to lay down. It was also perceived that if the new sovereign fell short in any point of his predecessor's excellence, he far surpassed him in range of thought, penetrative intellect, and variety and ful- ness of knowledge. Dr. Holmes's last two beoks purport to be records of monologues and conversations held at the breakfast- table of a boarding-house in Boston, and of some particulars in the lives of certain of its inmates. The plan is very particulars

adapted

to the author's purpose. It is in natural accordance with the discursive treatment of a great variety bf topics ; it lends itself more easily than the novel to the mingling together of disquisir tion, narrative, and sketches of character, for their mutual relief ; and it has immense advantages over the essay in its freedom from formality, and from the suspicion of one-sidednesswhich clings to all kinds of didactic rhetoric ; in the facilities it affords for varying the aspects and the lights in which a subject is viewed; and above all in the keener zest it gives, to the apprehension 'of thoughts which are not laid cut and dry before the reader, but which he seizes in the very process of their 'formation. The extracts we are about to make from the Professor's deliverances will not illustrate this characteristic of the book, but they will probably induce the reader to find it there for himself :—

TALK.

" What a man wants to do, in talking with a stranger, is to get and to give as much of the best and most real life that belongs to the two talkers as the time will let him. Life is short, and eouveraation apt to run to mere words. Mr. Huc, I think it is, who tells us some very good stories about the way in which two Chinese gentlemen contrive to keep up a long talk without say- ing a word which has any meaning in it. Something like this is oc- casionally heard on this side of the Great Wall. The beet Chinese talkers I know-ire some pretty women whom I meet from time to time. Pleasant, airy, complimentary, the little flakes of flattery glimmering in their talk like the bits of gold-leaf in eau-de-vie de Dantzie; their accents flowing on in a soft. ripple—never a wave, and never a calm ; words nicely fitted,' but never a coloured phrase or a highly-flavoured epithet ; they turn air into syllables so gracefully, that we find meaning for the music they make as we, find faces in the coals and fairy palaces in the clouds. There is something, very odd, though, about this mechanicaltalk. " You have sometimes been in a train on the railroad when the engine was detached a long way from the, station you were approaching ? Nell, you have noticed how quietly and rapidly the cars kept on, just as if the lode- Motive were drawing them ? Indeed, you would not, have suspected that you were travelling on the strength of a dead fact, if you had not seen the engine running away froni you on a side-track. Upon my conscience, I be- lieve some of these pretty, women detach their inutile entirely, sometimes, from their talk—and, what is 'more, that we never know the difference. Their lips let off the fluty syllibles just as their fingers would sprinkle the music-drops from their pianos; unconscious habit turns the phrase of thought into words just us it does that of music into notes. ;NV ell, they govern the world, for all that, these sweet-lipped women, beeause beauty is the index of a larger fact than wisdom."

TRUTH—OPINION. ,

"I find that there is a very prevalent opinion among the dwellers on the shores of Sir Isaac Newton's ocean of truth, that said fish, which have been taken from it a good while ago, split open, cured and,dried, are the only proper and allowable food- for reasonable people. I maintain, on the other hand, that there are a number of live _fish still swimming in it, and that every one of us has a right.to see if he cannot catch some of them. Some- times I please myself with the idea that I have landed an actual living fish, small, perhaps, but with rosy gills and silvery scales. Then I find the con- sumers of nothing but the salted and dried article insist that it is poisonous,

i

simply because it is alive, and cry out to people not to touch it. I have not found, however,: that people mind them much. - " The Hugglitonian sect have a Very odd way of dealing with people. If I, the Professor, will only give in to the lluggletonian doctrine, there shall be no question through all that persuasion that I am competent to judge of that doctrine ; nay, I shall be quoted as evidence of its truth while I live, and cited after I-am dead, as testimony in its behalf; but if I utter any evet so slight Anti-Muggletoman sentiment, then,rbecome incompetent to form any opinion.onthe matter- Ilia, you cannot fail to observe,,is exactly the, way the pseudo-sciences go to work, as explained in my Lecture on Phreno- logy. Now I hold that he whose testimony would be accepted in behalf of the llfuggletoniait doctrine has a right to be-heard against it. Whoso offers me any article of belief for' my signature iniplies that • I am' competent to form an opinion upon it and if my positive testimony in its favour is of any value, then my negative testimony against it is also of value.

" Do you know that. every man has a religious belief peculiar to himself ? Smith is always a Smithite, He takes in exactly Smith's-worth of know- ledge, Sinith's-worth of truth, of•beauty, of divinity. _And brown has from time immemorial been trying to burn him to excommunicate him, to anonymous-article-him, because he Aid not take in Brown's-worth of know- ledge, truth, beauty, divinity. He cannot dolt, any more than a jilat-pot can hold a quart, or a quart-pot be filled by a pint. Iron is essentially the same everywhere and always; but the sulphate of iron is never the same as the carbonate of iron. Truth is invariable ; but the Suithate of truth must always differ froni the Browne& of truth.

"A man's opinione, look you, are generally of much more value than his arguments. These last are made by his brain, and perhaps he does not be- hove the proposition they tend to prove,—as is often the case with paid lawyers ; but opinions are formed by our whole nature,—brain, heart, in- stinct, brute life, everything all our experience has shaped for us by contact with the whole circle of our being."

d' Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks ?

" The arguments which the greatest of our schoolmen could not refute were two :—the blood in men's veins, and the milk in women's breasts."

CONSISTENCY.

" I think you will find that people who honestly mean to be true contra- dict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be ' consistent.' "

FAITH.

" Faith always implies the disbelief of a lesser fact in favour of a greater. A little mind often sees the unbelief, without seeing the belief, of a large one."

RILL-JOYS.

"I tell you this odd thing; there are a good many persons, who, through the habit of making other folks uncomfortable, by finding fault with all their cheerful enjoyments, at last get up a kind of hostility to comfort in general, even in their own persons. The correlative to loving our neigh- bours as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbours."

INFANCY.

" . . . . The little heap of stirring clothes, from which looked the minute, red, downy, still, round face, with unfixed eyes and working lips,—in that unearthly gravity which has never yet been broken by a smile, and which gives to the earliest moon-year er two of an infant's life the character of afirst old age, to counterpoise that second childhood which there is one chance in a dozen it may reach by and by."

A MOTHER'S MEMORY.

" What is there quite so profoundly human as an old man's memory of a mother who died in his earlier years ? Mother she remains till manhood, and by and by she grows to be as a sister ; and at last, when wrinkled and bowed and broken, he looks back upon her in her fair youth, he sees in the sweet image be caresses, not his parent, but, as it were, his child."

GENIUS AND CHARACTER.

"A person of geniurshould marry a person of character. Genius does not herd with genius. The musk-deer and the civet-cat are never found in company. They don't care for strange scents,—they like plain animals better tha'n perfumed ones: Nay, if you will have the kindness to notice, Nature has not gifted my lady musk-deer with the personal peculiarity by which her lord is so' widely known. "Nam when genies allies itself with character, the world is very apt to think character has the best of the bargain. A brilliant woman marries a plain, manly fellow, with a simple, intellectual mechanism ; we have all seen such cases. The world often stares a good deal and wonders. She should have taken that other, with a far more complex mental machinery. She might have had a watch with the philosophical compensation-balance, with the metaphysical index which can split a second into tenths, with the musical chime which can turn every quarter of an hour into melody. She has chosen a plain one, that keeps good time, and that is all.

" Let her alone ! She knows what she is about. Genius has an infinitely deeper reverence for character than character can have for genius. To be sure, genius gets the world's praise, because its work is a tangible product, to be bought, or had for nothing. It bribes the common voice to praise it by presents of speeches, poems, statues, pictures, or whatever it can please with. Character evolves its best products for home consumption ; but, mindyou' it takes a deal more to feed a family for thirty years than to make a holiday feast for our neighbours once or twice in our lives. You talk of theffre of genius. Many a blessed woman, who dies unsung and unremem- bered, has given out more of the real vital heat that keeps the life in human souls, without a spark flitting through her humble chimney to tell the world about it,, than would set a dozen theories smoking, or a hundred odes sim- mering, in the brains of so many men of genius. It is in latent calorie, if I may borrow a philosophical expression, that many of the noblest hearts give out the life that warms them. Cornelia's lips grew white, and her pulse hardly warms her thin fingers —but she has melted all the ice out of the hearts of those young Graced, and her lost heart is in the blood of her youthful heroes. We are always valuing the soul's temperature by the ther- mometer of public deed or word. Yet the great sun himself, when be pours his noonday beams upon some vast hyaline boulder, rent from the eternal ice-quarries, and floating toward the tropics, never warms it a fraction above the thirty-two degrees of Fahrenheit that marked

the moment when the first drop Srickled down its side. * • *

" — It takes a very tree mean to be a fitting companion for a woman of genius, but not a very great one. I am not sure that she will not embroider her ideal better on a plain ground than on one with a brilliant pattern al- ready worked in its texture. But as the very essence of genius is truthful- ness, contact with realities, (which are always ideas behind shows of form or language,) nothing is so contemptible as falsehood and pretence in its eyes. Nowit is not easy to find a perfectly true woman, and it is very hard to find a perfectly true man. And a woman of genius, who has the sagacity to Choose such a one as her companion, shows more of the divine gift in so doing than in her finest talk or her most brilliant work of letters or of art."