[Footnote 1:  Mon Henri quatre et ma Zaire, Et mon Americaine Alzire, Ne m’ont valu jamais un seul regard du roi; J’eus beaucoup d’ennemis avec tres-peu de gloire.  Les honneurs et les biens pleuvent enfin sur moi Pour une farce de la foire.—­La Princesse de Navarro.]

* * * * *

The athenaeum upon Hawthorne.[2]

The London Athenaeum, of the 15th June, has the following remarks upon the last work of Nathaniel Hawthorne: 

“This is a most powerful and painful story.  Mr. Hawthorne must be well known to our readers as a favorite of the Athenaeum.  We rate him as among the most original and peculiar writers of American fiction.  There in his works a mixture of Puritan reserve and wild imagination, of passion and description, of the allegorical and the real, which some will fail to understand, and which others will positively reject,—­but which, to ourselves, is fascinating, and which entitles him to be placed on a level with Brockden Brown and the author of ’Rip Van Winkle.’  ‘The Scarlet Letter’ will increase his reputation with all who do not shrink from the invention of the tale; but this, as we have said, is more than ordinarily painful.  When we have announced that the three characters are a guilty wife, openly punished for her guilt,—­her tempter, whom she refuses to unmask, and who during the entire story carries a fair front and an unblemished name among his congregation,—­and her husband, who, returning from a long absence at the moment of her sentence, sits himself down betwixt the two in the midst of a small and severe community to work out his slow vengeance on both under the pretext of magnanimous forgiveness,—­when we have explained that ‘The Scarlet Letter’ is the badge of Hester Prynne’s shame, we ought to add that we recollect no tale dealing with crime so sad and revenge so subtly diabolical, that is at the same time so clear of fever and of prurient excitement.  The misery of the woman is as present in every page as the heading which in the title of the romance symbolizes her punishment.  Her terrors concerning her strange elvish child present retribution in a form which is new and natural:—­her slow and painful purification through repentance is crowned by no perfect happiness, such as awaits the decline of those who have no dark and bitter past to remember.  Then, the gradual corrosion of heart of Dimmesdale, the faithless priest, under the insidious care of the husband, (whose relationship to Hester is a secret known only to themselves,) is appalling; and his final confession and expiation are merely a relief, not a reconciliation.  We are by no means satisfied that passions and tragedies like these are the legitimate subjects for fiction:  we are satisfied that novels such as ‘Adam Blair,’ and plays such as ‘The Stranger,’ maybe justly charged with attracting more persons than they