IN

N the spring of 1853 Hawthorne received from his life-long friend, President Pierce, the appointment of United States Consul at Liverpool, then one of the most lucrative places in the gift of the Executive. He held the post for four years, but remained in England two years longer, leaving the country finally in 1859. Though Though the duties of his office could not have been much to his taste, he discharged them with exemplary diligence, and, we believe, to the satisfaction of all who did business with him. His will was strong, and his sense of duty was not less strong; and he had already been trained to do disagreeable work, for he had been for six years a measurer of coal and salt in the Boston CustomHouse, and afterwards for three years surveyor of the port of Salem.

But looking at the growth of his mind, these nine long years of enforced and against-the-grain work were precious to him. They took him out of the world of dreams into the world of life. They gave him subjects for re-, flection. They sharpened his powers of observation. They braced and gave

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tone to his intellectual fibre. kept rust and mould from gathering on his mind. If they postponed for a time the act of writing, they supplied ample material for literary work in the future. It may be well doubted whether we should have had The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables but for the growth and discipline of the previous years of uncongenial drudgery and constrained contact with his kind. The iron of compulsion which entered into his soul became a tonic to his intellectual blood.

Indeed, as a general rule, it is well for a man of genius to give a portion of every day to some regular employment, more or less mechanical in its nature, which does not task the higher faculties, and is followed as a duty, and not from impulse merely. Coleridge gives the same counsel in another form when, in his Biographia Literaria, he earnestly advises young men, who in early life feel themselves disposed to become authors, never to pursue literature as a trade. As he justly remarks, the necessity of earning one's bread by writing will, with most men of genius,

convert the stimulant into a narcotic. Coleridge himself, that stately argosy so richly freighted with intellectual wealth, but drifting to and fro over the waters of life without the rudder of will, was a striking proof of the evils of being without a profession, or any regular employment to which he might have gone, day by day, as a merchant goes to his counting-room or a lawyer to his office. Sir Walter Scott and Charles Lamb, men very unlike in mental structure, were both fortunate in having an occupation of this kind; and had a like lot been laid upon Byron, he would have been a better and a happier man, and none the less brilliant as a poet. To coin one's genius into bread is to harness Pegasus into an expresswagon. To be sure, there are striking exceptions to this general rule. Dickens, for instance, gained wealth by the exercise of a rare genius, but look at the ill-requited toils and heart-breaking struggles of Hood! And had Hawthorne himself earned nothing but by his pen, he would have left no provision for his family.

But if Hawthorne's life in England were not entirely to his taste, it was profitable, and bore good fruit; for we owe to it two remarkable books, Our Old Home, published in 1863, and the Passages from English Note - Books, now before us. We say if his life were not entirely to his taste, for the mere fact that two such books grew out of the soil of his English experience proves that such experience could not have been all distasteful. No man ever makes a book out of what he desires utterly to forget. And there were elements in his nature which were in harmony with the duties of his official life, and which would lighten the burden of its drudgeries and disgusts. For he was a man as peculiar in character as he was unique in genius. In him opposite qualities met, and were happily and harmoniously blended; and this was true of him physically as well as intellectually. He was tall and strongly built, with broad shoulders, deep chest, a massive head, black

hair, and large dark eyes. Wherever he was he attracted attention by his imposing presence. He looked like a man who might have held the strokeoar in a university boat. And his genius, as all the world knows, was of masculine force and sweep.

But, on the other hand, no man had more of the feminine element than he. He was feminine in his quick perceptions, his fine insight, his sensibility to beauty, his delicate reserve, his purity of feeling. No man comprehended woman more perfectly; none has painted woman with a more exquisite and ethereal pencil. And his face was as mobile and rapid in its changes of expression as is the face of a young girl. His lip and cheek heralded the word before it was spoken. His eyes would darken visibly under the touch of a passing emotion, like the waters of a fountain ruffled by the breeze of summer. too, he was the shyest of men. The claims and courtesies of social life were terrible to him. The thought of making a call would keep him awake in his bed. At breakfast, he could not lay a piece of butter upon a lady's plate without a little trembling of the hand: this is a fact, and not a phrase. He was so shy that in the presence of two intimate friends he would be less easy and free-spoken than in that of only one.

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And yet the presence of his kind was cordial, and in some sense necessary to him. If his shyness held him back, his sympathies drew him out with a force nearly as strong. And, unlike most men who are at once intellectual and shy, he was not a lover, or a student, of books. He read books as they came in his way, or for a particular purpose, but he made no claim to the honors of learning or scholarship. A great library had no charms for him. He rarely bought a book, and the larger part of his small collection had come to him by gift. His mind did not feed upon the printed page. It will be noticed that in his writings he very seldom introduces a quotation, or makes any allusion to the writings of others. The raptures of the bibliomaniac, fond

ling his tall copies, his wide margins, his unique specimens, his vellum pages, were as strange to him as are the movements of a violin-player's arm to the deaf man's eye. In the summer of 1859 the writer of this notice - who confesses to an insatiable passion for the possession of books, and an omnivorous appetite for their contents saw him at Leamington, and was invited by him into his study, the invitation being accompanied with one of his peculiar and indescribable smiles, in which there lurked a consciousness of his friend's weakness. The study was a small, square room, with a table and chair, but absolutely not a single book. He liked writing better than reading. The volumes he studied with the most satisfaction were the faces of men and women; provided always that the volumes did not know him. But a gleam of recognition was enough to turn aside his glance of observation. Without doubt, some of his happiest hours were passed in long rambles through the populous solitudes of Liverpool and London, where no man greeted him, where the human beings he saw were like trees in a wood, where faces could be studied like shells in a drawer or stuffed birds in a cage.

To a man with such powers of observation as Hawthorne, and such taste for using them, the post of American Consul in a large commercial city like Liverpool must have had some decided attractions. He was an artist to whom all sorts of picturesque subjects were constantly sitting for their portraits. And no man can know what strange beasts are produced by the soil of America, until he goes to Europe. At home, a man of Hawthorne's pursuits and position would have seen only the normal growth of his countrymen, · men resembling each other as marbles in a boy's pocket, prosperous and respectable men, graduates of colleges, who sit down to three meals a day, who draw checks to pay their bills, and lock their front doors at the same hour every night. But in Liverpool he would see Americans of a different class,

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who had left their country for their country's good or their own, the stepchildren and outcasts of the land, poor waifs and strays of humanity, floating social sea-weeds with no root to grasp anything with a firm hold, forlorn wanderers over the face of the earth, always needy and sometimes ragged and starving. Not without gifts, faculties, and accomplishments are these vagabonds; sometimes many-tongued, always fluent of speech, plausible in manner, with marked individual traits which stand bare to the eye, with no rags of reserve or self-restraint to cover them. Without doubt these social outlaws were better subjects for a literary limner than the sleek children of prosperity, just as a ruined and ivy-grown cottage is a more picturesque object than a smart suburban villa. Hawthorne improved his opportunities need not be said to any one who has read the first essay in Our Old Home, entitled Consular Experiences, - one of the best specimens in all his writings of what may be called the prose side of his genius. In minute detail and vigorous portraiture it is a sort of combination of Teniers and Rembrandt. For keen insight, sharp observation, shrewd common sense, knowledge of man, and a mingling of humor and tenderness, it can hardly be surpassed. Little did the originals of these sketches suspect that an eye like a blind man's finger was all the time fixed upon them! Little did they dream of the anonymous immortality that was awaiting them at the hands of the dark-browed man that said so little and heard so much! His account of the reprobate doctor of divinity is painfully interesting; a powerful delineation of a repulsive subject, but made tragic by gleams of light from the central caverns of passion and sin in the human heart. How singular it was that Hawthorne in his official capacity should thus have had revealed to him a man in whom the lowest and grossest propensities were covered over by a thin veneering of respectability and self-restraint, shattered by the first touch of temptation,

thus presenting a combination so much in harmony with the creations of his own genius!

We will, however, bring Hawthorne himself to testify as to the character of the persons with whom his consular life brought him in contact. Our readers may have read the passage before, but it will bear a second perusal :

"Hither, in the course of my incumbency, came a great variety of visitors, principally Americans, but including almost every other nationality on earth, especially the distressed and downfallen ones like those of Poland and Hungary, Italian bandits (for so they looked), proscribed conspirators from old Spain, Spanish Americans, Cubans who professed to have stood by Lopez and narrowly escaped his fate, scarred French soldiers of the Second Republic, in a word, all sufferers, or pretended ones, in the cause of liberty, all people homeless in the widest sense, those who never had a country or had lost it, those whom their native land had impatiently flung off for planning a better system of things than they were born to, a multitude of these, and, doubtless, an equal number of jail-birds, outwardly of the same feather, sought the American Consulate in hopes of at least a bit of bread, and, perhaps, to beg a passage to the blessed shores of Freedom. In most cases there was nothing, and in any case distressingly little, to be done for them; neither was I of a proselyting disposition, nor desired to make my consulate a nucleus for the vagrant discontents of other lands. And yet it was a proud thought, a forcible appeal to the sympathies of an American, that these unfortunates claimed the privileges of citizenship in our Republic on the strength of the very same noble misdemeanors that had rendered them outlaws to their native despotisms. So I gave them what small help I could. Methinks the true patriots and martyrspirits of the whole world should have been conscious of a pang near the heart, when a deadly blow was aimed at the vitality of a country which they

have felt to be their own in the last resort." - Our Old Home, p. 13.

But there were other and better men that crossed his path. The masters of the American vessels trading to Liverpool are, as a general rule, persons worth knowing and talking to. They are intelligent men, fairly well educated, sometimes not ignorant of books, shrewd observers of men, with plain but good manners, and with a manly heartiness about them like a bracing breeze from the sea. The many tempests that have shaken their beards have given force to their characters and a keen edge to their faculties. A mind like Hawthorne's would find more satisfaction in communion with men like these than with men of more cultivation, finer fibre, but less strength and flavor. Without doubt, he was sometimes bored by respectable dulness in broadcloth and fine linen, by pompous emptinesses in the shape of great men in small places, by callers that had no due sense of the brevity of human life: but who in this melancholy world is not bored? He who would never be bored must bolt his door and break his looking-glass.

His official duties were, for the most part, matters of routine, neither good nor bad, and certainly not worse than what he had experienced in Boston and Salem. We suppose that Hawthorne found no part of his official life so little to his taste as those ceremonials and parade occasions which would have been so congenial to most of his countrymen. For he was one of those exceptional Americans,-would there were more of them! - who have no power of public speech, and recoil with horror and alarm from anything which may call upon them to display their incapacity. But the American Consul at Liverpool is a public personage, and thus his presence is a necessity sometimes at public gatherings, and especially at those civic banquets wherein the municipal dignitaries of so rich a city are wont to seek relief from the austere cares of government and administration. The dinner in England,

as every one knows who has been there, rises to the dignity of an institution. It is not to speak it profanely-a sort of secular sacrament. It takes its place among the choicest jewels of the Englishman's soul,—with the memory of Alfred, with Magna Charta and the Revolution of 1688, with foxhunting and the Times newspaper. The Englishman is willing to speak and to hear speaking, but he prefers to have them dressed with bread and beef sauce. If the tongue and the ear are to be busy, the teeth must not be idle. A dry-lipped entertainment like an American caucus, where the guests are treated to nothing more savory or nutritious than the east wind, is not at all to the Anglican taste. And thus it happened that Hawthorne, who was no eater, no drinker, and no speech-maker, was of ten called upon to take a conspicuous part at entertainments where there was nothing but eating, drinking, and speech-making. Indeed, these were sad days to him; when the summons came, he smote his breast like the wedding guest in The Ancient Mariner when he heard the loud bassoon. With many dollars would he have purchased exemption; but in his case, too, there was a "glittering eye" which constrained him, the eye of the American eagle at home, three thousand miles off. And so he went, with a little speech in his head, and perhaps in his pocket; and he survived the operation, and lived to tell us how he felt when under the knife. Both in Our Old Home and in his English Note-Books he alludes to what he endured in these postprandial exhibitions of himself. Though the reader of the former work can hardly have forgotten its closing passages, we will refresh his recollection by quoting them:

"As soon as the Lord Mayor began to speak, I rapped upon my mind, and it gave forth a hollow sound; being absolutely empty of appropriate ideas. I never thought of listening to the speech, because I knew it all beforehand in twenty repetitions from other lips, and was aware that it would not offer a single suggestive point. In this

dilemma I turned to one of my three friends, a gentleman whom I knew to possess an enviable flow of silver speech, and obtested him, by whatever he deemed holiest, to give me at least an available thought or two to start with, and, once afloat, I would trust to my guardian angel for enabling me to flounder ashore again. He advised me to begin with some remarks complimentary to the Lord Mayor, and expressive of the hereditary reverence in which his office was held - at least, my friend thought that there would be no harm in giving his lordship this little sugar-plum, whether quite the fact or no was held by the descendants of the Puritan forefathers. Thence, if I liked, getting flexible with the oil of my own eloquence, I might easily slide off into the momentous subject of the relations between England and America, to which his lordship had made such weighty allusion. Seizing this handful of straw with a death grip, and bidding my three friends bury me honorably, I got upon my legs to save both countries, or perish in the attempt. The tables roared and thundered at me, and suddenly were silent again. But, as I have never happened to stand in a position of greater dignity and peril, I deem it a stratagem of sage policy here to close these sketches, leaving myself still erect in so heroic an attitude." Our Old Home, p. 397.

How delightfully provoking this is! Never shall we know how he got out of the scrape. There he stands forever on his feet, with a listening table around and his lips pregnant with an undelivered speech. He is like the young lover in Keats's delicious Ode to a Grecian Urn:

"Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal." Never shall we know whether his speech was "neat and appropriate," whether it was "received with shouts of applause," or whether, after gasping and choking, he ignominiously broke down, resuming his seat with drops of agony on his brow, a humming sound in his ears, a sense of faintness and suffo