of amusement to the public.  Hawthorne’s humor was quiet and fine, like Irving’s, but less genial and with a more satiric edge to it.  The book last named was written at Salem and published in 1850, just before its author’s removal to Lenox, now a sort of inland Newport, but then an unfashionable resort among the Berkshire hills.  Whatever obscurity may have hung over Hawthorne hitherto was effectually dissolved by this powerful tale, which was as vivid in coloring as the implication of its title.  Hawthorne chose for his background the somber life of the early settlers of New England.  Ho had always been drawn toward this part of American history, and in Twice-Told Tales had given some illustrations of it in Endicott’s Red Cross and Legends of the Province House.  Against this dark foil moved in strong relief the figures of Hester Prynne, the woman taken in adultery; her paramour, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale; her husband, old Roger Chillingworth; and her illegitimate child.  In tragic power, in its grasp of the elementary passions of human nature and its deep and subtle insight into the inmost secrets of the heart, this is Hawthorne’s greatest book.  He never crowded his canvas with figures.  In the Blithedale Romance and the Marble Faun there is the same parti carre or group of four characters.  In the House of the Seven Gables there are five.  The last mentioned of these, published in 1852, was of a more subdued intensity than the Scarlet Letter, but equally original, and, upon the whole, perhaps equally good.  The Blithedale Romance, published in the same year, though not strikingly inferior to the others, adhered more to conventional patterns in its plot and in the sensational nature of its ending.  The suicide of the heroine by drowning, and the terrible scene of the recovery of her body, were suggested to the author by an experience of his own on Concord River, the account of which, in his own words, may be read in Julian Hawthorne’s Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife.  In 1852 Hawthorne returned to Concord and bought the “Wayside” property, which he retained until his death.  But in the following year his old college friend Pierce, now become President, appointed him consul to Liverpool, and he went abroad for seven years.  The most valuable fruit of his foreign residence was the romance of the Marble Faun, 1860, the longest of his fictions and the richest in descriptive beauty.  The theme of this was the development of the soul through the experience of sin.  There is a haunting mystery thrown about the story, like a soft veil of mist, veiling the beginning and the end.  There is even a delicate teasing suggestion of the preternatural in Donatello, the Faun, a creation as original as Shakespeare’s Caliban or Fouque’s Undine, and yet quite on this side the border-line of the human. Our Old Home, a book of charming papers on England, was published in 1863.  Manifold experience of life