finally got up and made his speech, his “voice, meantime, having a far-off and remote echo,” and when, as we learn from others, a burst of applause greeted a few well-chosen words drawn from that full well of thought, that pellucid rill of “English undefiled,” the unobtrusive gentleman by his side applauded and said to him, “It was handsomely done.”  The compliment pleased the shy man.  It is the only compliment to himself which Hawthorne ever recorded.

Now, had Hawthorne been congratulated by a sympathetic, effusive American, who had clapped him on the back, and who had said, “O, never fear—­you will speak well!” he would have said nothing.  The shy sprite in his own eyes would have read in his neighbor’s eyes the dreadful truth that his sympathetic neighbor would have indubitably betrayed—­a fear that he would not do well.  The phlegmatic and stony Englishman neither felt nor cared whether Hawthorne spoke well or ill; and, although pleased that he did speak well, invested no particular sympathy in the matter, either for or against, and so spared Hawthorne’s shyness the last bitter drop in the cup, which would have been a recognition of his own moral dread.  Hawthorne bitterly records his own sufferings.  He says, in one of his books, “At this time I acquired this accursed habit of solitude.”  It has been said that the Hawthorne family were, in the earlier generation, afflicted with shyness almost as a disease—­certainly a curious freak of nature in a family descended from robust sea-captains.  It only goes to prove how far away are the influences which control our natures and our actions.

Whether, if Hawthorne had not been a shy man, afflicted with a sort of horror of his species at times, always averse to letting himself go, miserable and morbid, we should have been the inheritors of the great fortune which he has left us, is not for us to decide.  Whether we should have owned “The Gentle Boy,” the immortal “Scarlet Letter,” “The House with Seven Gables,” “The Marble Faun,” and all the other wonderful things which grew out of that secluded and gifted nature, had he been born a cheerful, popular, and sympathetic boy, with a dancing-school manner, instead of an awkward and shy youth (although an exceedingly handsome one), we can not tell.  That is the great secret behind the veil.  The answer is not yet made, the oracle has not spoken, and we must not invade the penumbra of genius.

WASHINGTON AND IRVING.

It has always been a comfort to the awkward and the shy that Washington could not make an after-dinner speech; and the well-known anecdote—­“Sit down, Mr. Washington, your modesty is even greater than your valor”—­must have consoled many a voiceless hero.  Washington Irving tried to welcome Dickens, but failed in the attempt, while Dickens was as voluble as he was gifted.  Probably the very surroundings of sympathetic admirers unnerved both Washington and Irving, although there are some men who can never “speak on their legs,” as the saying goes, in any society.