gorous, highly-finished performance, of sterling value for its originality, its shrewd perception of character, its descriptions, its humour, and its plot. Nothing, says one of his reviewers, can be better than the manner in which Mr. Hawthorne presses superstition into his service as a romancer, leaving the reader to guess and explain such marvels as, at first seen down the dim vista of time, are reproduced more faintly in the world of the real present. His passion for studying idiosyncrasy is largely illustrated in this fine legend. He seems to have as keen a zest for individuality and eccentricity as Charles Lamb himself in actual life. "Common natures," says the latter,[1] "do not suffice me. Good people, as they are called, won't serve. I want individuals. I am made up of queer points, and I want. so many answering needles." And thorough "individuals"—in the sense most grateful to Elia, and most grammatically satisfactory to Archdeacon Hare[2]—are Clifford and Hephzibah Pyncheon, Holgrave the daguerreotypist, racy old Uncle Venner, and that dainty piece of little womanhood, cousin Phœbe. Judge Pyncheon is one of those whited sepulchres from which Mr. Hawthorne has such a knack in scraping off the paint; the contrast between the male cousins is admirably brought out, and the effect of the catastrophe upon Clifford is developed with true "subjective" power. We love the description of the Old House, with its quaint figures and grotesque gothicisms, its seven gables and multitudinous lattices, its spacious porch, its mysterious fountain, its garden and grassplot. The book is rich, too, in "strong situations." It gives unusual scope, moreover, to its author's humour—for instance, the etching of the "First Customer," with his illimitable appetite for gingerbread versions of Jim Crow immediately after breakfast, and an elephant or two of the same matériel, as a preliminary whet before dinner—or the portrait of good Unele Venner, with his immemorial white head and wrinkles, and solitary tooth, and dapper blue coat, ill-supported by tow-cloth trousers, very short in the legs, and bagging down strangely in the. rear,—in short, a miscellaneous old gentleman, partly himself, but, in good measure, somebody else,—an epitome of times and fashions. Mr. Hawthorne's humour is habitually of a quiet order, contenting itself with descriptive passages at intervals, and glances of sarcasm en passant—sometimes, however, bubbling into the farcical, as in the fragment touching Mrs, Bullfrog. Old Maid Pyncheon's character, a compound of the pathetic and the ludicrous, affords ample play for the comic element; and it is instructive to observe the limits to which comedy is restrained, and how it is made to enhance what is affecting in the poor spinster's portraiture.
Such are this author's two leading works. Before their appearance, he had gained celebrity at home as a gifted tale-teller and essayist, by the publication of "Twice-Told Tales," and "Mosses from an Old Manse." Folks there are, in this unaccountable world, who can afford, or pretend they can afford, to turn up their nose (like a peacock, as Miss Squeers has it) at tales and story-books. These "potent, grave, and reverend signiors" affect to say with one of Molière’s heroes,
- ↑ Life and Letters, vol. ii.
- ↑ See "Guesses at Truth," vol. i, p. 151, 3rd edition.
