_Oliver Wendell Holmes._--Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) stands in some contrast to the chief writers of the Transcendental School. On the whole they were marked by deliberate seriousness, but he possessed a clear, crisp spontaneity which often broke forth into sparkling fun. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a member of what he facetiously styled “The Brahmin Caste” of New England, he counted among his ancestors more than one English governor of the Colonial period and that famous woman of her time, Anne Bradstreet, “the Tenth Muse.” After being graduated from Harvard College in 1829, he studied law for a year and then turned to medicine. Completing his education in Paris, Holmes returned to America in 1835 to enter upon the practice of his profession, but in 1839 accepted a professorship of anatomy at Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire. The following year he entered upon a similar position in the Harvard Medical School, and remained there until 1882. In 1886, Holmes visited Europe and received honorary degrees from Edinburgh, Oxford, and Cambridge. The eight remaining years of his life he spent quietly at his home in Boston, graciously receiving even strangers, who felt that they had not really seen that city unless they had shaken Dr. Holmes by the hand. Of Holmes’ prose work his “Breakfast Table” series best defends his right to claim a permanent place of fame. “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,” after appearing serially in the first and second volumes of _The Atlantic Monthly_ (1857-1858), was immediately republished in book form, and was succeeded by “The Professor at the Breakfast Table” (1859), “The Poet at the Breakfast Table” (1872), and “Over the Tea-Cups” (1891). These works, which have been rather aptly characterised as “a cross between an essay and a drama,” contain comments on almost everything in the heavens above, the earth beneath, and the waters under the earth. The books are at times delightfully whimsical and scintillatingly witty, at others deeply serious and minutely analytic, and at still others tenderly generous and movingly pathetic. Holmes’ other important works in prose are two volumes of biography, a “Memoir of John Lothrop Motley” (1879) and a “Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson” (1884); one book of essays, “Pages from an Odd Volume of Life” (1883); and one diary of travel, “Our Hundred Days in Europe” (1887).