_The Poet at the Breakfast-Table_, a storehouse of delightful inventions, proved the least attractive of the three to the public. But all of Holmes’s old-time skill returned when he wrote _Over the Teacups_, his last book. The framework is simple but attractive, the characters have genuine vitality and pique the reader by suggesting that they must have been drawn from life. The Dictator is an old friend. Number Five, the Tutor, the Counsellor, the two Annexes, Number Seven, the Mistress and Delilah are agreeable acquaintances, and the misfortune is ours if we do not know them as well as the figures of _The Autocrat_. All these books are personal, known as such, and deriving half their charm from the reader’s ability to recognize Holmes himself under various disguises. In _Our Hundred Days in Europe_ the author speaks _in propria persona_, and the volume may be described as a big printed letter addressed to the writer’s friends, who, loving him as they do, will rejoice in his happiness and his triumphs. V THE POET The Autocrat’s poetical works contain a generous measure of what elderly bards call their ‘juvenilia.’ We all understand the term. It means verses which the bards in question would gladly have left in the solitude of old magazines, and which admirers insist on dragging into light,--poems that help to stock the school readers and speakers, and which, because the copyright has expired by the unjust law of the land, compilers of anthologies seize on and parade as representative. That Holmes suffers but little by the persistence of his ‘juvenilia’ and ‘early verses’ is due to their frankly comic and grotesque character. The reader is spared faded sentiment, and he is heartily amused by the ingenuity of the conceits, the sparkle of the rhymes, the satire, the epigrammatic wit. There is mirth still in that brilliant essay in verbal gymnastics ‘The Comet’ (a dyspeptic’s dream), in ‘The September Gale’ (a boy’s lament for his Sunday breeches, blown from the line one fatal wash-day and never recovered), in ‘The Spectre Pig’ (a parody on Dana’s ‘Buccaneer’), in ‘The Height of the Ridiculous,’ ‘Daily Trials,’ ‘The Treadmill Song,’ ‘The Dorchester Giant,’ ‘The Music-Grinders,’ and the heartlessly funny poem entitled ‘My Aunt.’