The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Poet at the Breakfast Table
by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

(The Physician and Poet, not the Jurist O. W. Holmes, Jr.)

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Title: The Poet at the Breakfast Table

Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Last Updated: February 11, 2009
Release Date: August 15, 2006 [EBook #2666]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE POET AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE ***

Produced by David Widger

THE POET AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE

by Oliver Wendell Holmes

PREFACE.

In this, the third series of Breakfast-Table conversations, a slight
dramatic background shows off a few talkers and writers, aided by
certain silent supernumeraries. The machinery is much like that of
the two preceding series. Some of the characters must seem like old
acquaintances to those who have read the former papers. As I read these
over for the first time for a number of years, I notice one character;
presenting a class of beings who have greatly multiplied during
the interval which separates the earlier and later Breakfast-Table
papers,--I mean the scientific specialists. The entomologist, who
confines himself rigidly to the study of the coleoptera, is intended
to typify this class. The subdivision of labor, which, as we used to
be told, required fourteen different workmen to make a single pin,
has reached all branches of knowledge. We find new terms in all the
Professions, implying that special provinces have been marked off, each
having its own school of students. In theology we have many curious
subdivisions; among the rest eschatology, that is to say, the geography,
geology, etc., of the "undiscovered country;" in medicine, if the
surgeon who deals with dislocations of the right shoulder declines to
meddle with a displacement on the other side, we are not surprised, but
ring the bell of the practitioner who devotes himself to injuries of the
left shoulder.

On the other hand, we have had or have the encyclopaedic intelligences
like Cuvier, Buckle, and more emphatically Herbert Spencer, who take all
knowledge, or large fields of it, to be their province. The author of
"Thoughts on the Universe" has somethi