The reputation which Holmes began early to build up through his writings was partly literary, partly scientific, partly a compound of both. Lovers of well-turned and witty verse knew him through his _Poems_ (1836) and his metrical essays, _Urania_ (1846) and _Astræa_ (1850). The public, always solicitous about its health, heard or read the two lectures on _Homœopathy and its kindred Delusions_ (1842). Physicians made his acquaintance through the _Boylston Prize Dissertations_ (1836–37), and the _Essay on the Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever_ (1843). Fame came to Holmes in 1857 when he began printing in the newly founded ‘Atlantic Monthly’ a series of papers entitled _The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_. Reprinted as a book, it at once took its proper place as an American classic, and now after forty-eight years its popularity seems in no degree lessened. The following list contains the principal works upon which Holmes’s reputation as a man of letters rests. A full bibliography must be consulted if one would know the extent of his literary and scientific activity: _The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_, 1858; _The Professor at the Breakfast-Table_, 1860; _Currents and Counter-Currents, with Other Addresses_, 1861; _Elsie Venner_, 1861; _Songs in Many Keys_, 1862; _Soundings from the Atlantic_, 1864; _The Guardian Angel_, 1867; _The Poet at the Breakfast-Table_, 1872; _Songs of Many Seasons_, 1875; _Memoir of John Lothrop Motley_, 1879; _The Iron Gate and Other Poems_, 1880; _Pages from an Old Volume of Life_, 1883; _A Mortal Antipathy_, 1885; _Ralph Waldo Emerson_, 1885; _Our Hundred Days in Europe_, 1887; _Before the Curfew and Other Poems_, 1888; _Over the Teacups_, 1891. Holmes’s life was without marked incident. His work at the Medical School, his public lectures, social engagements, the normal and agreeable responsibilities of home and society, filled the measure of his days. The visit to England in 1886, when he was made a D. C. L. by Oxford, a Litt. D. by Cambridge, and an LL. D. by Edinburgh, was something like apotheosis, if the term be not too extravagant. He endured the evils consequent on old age with philosophic composure, and it became at the last a matter of scientific curiosity with him to see how long he could maintain life. He was spared a tedious illness, and died an almost painless death on October 7, 1894. II THE MAN Among the ‘Autocrat’s’ distinguishing traits was humanity. He has recorded the feeling of ‘awe-stricken sympathy’ at first sight of the white faces of the sick in the hospital wards. ‘The dreadful scenes in the operating theatre--for this was before the days of ether--were a great shock to my sensibilities.’ His nerves hardened in time, but he was always keenly alive to human suffering. There is a note of contempt in his reference to Lisfranc, the surgeon, who ‘regretted the splendid guardsmen of the Empire because they had such magnificent thighs to amputate.’