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