e company of intimate personal friends, from whom all
restraint was removed, that Hawthorne ever indulged in his natural
buoyancy of spirits. Among them he occasionally condescended to
uproarious fun. But he was like Dr. Johnson, who, when indulging in a
scene of wild hilarity, suddenly exclaimed to his friends, as Beau
Brummel approached, "Let us be grave; here comes a fool." If there was
the slightest suspicion of there being a fool in the company Hawthorne
always wore his armor. The pretentious and transcendental fools he
hated worst of all; and the young man who had no taste for the finite,
but thought the infinite was the thing for him, always left him with a
feeling as of asphyxia.

Hawthorne's atmosphere was really unhealthy for transcendentalists. No
doubt his dislike of Margaret Fuller arose from this feeling of his that
she was always acting a part, always straining after an effect. He loved
simple, natural, unaffected people, and the part of a sibyl was very
distasteful to him. He suspected the inspiration of green tea in much
that Margaret said, and very ungallantly pronounced her a humbug. But as
he did this only upon the paper of his own private diary, with no
thought of it ever being paraded before a critical and captious world,
we should not blame him too severely. And if he was mistaken in what he
wrote concerning her husband and her life in Rome, as seems to be the
fact, no doubt he was deceived by gossip-loving friends in Rome
concerning the matter. One does not write gratuitous falsehoods upon the
pages of one's private notebook about acquaintances, as a general rule.
If he had desired to injure Margaret he would have put his supposed
facts in a different place, no doubt, and not merely written them in a
moment of spleen where he never expected them to be seen.

The publication of such comment as this, and Carlyle's mention of
Charles Lamb and others, seems to be due entirely to the total depravity
of literary executors. As George Eliot says, it is like uncovering the
dead Byron's club-foot, when he had been so sensitive about it through
life, as his friend Trelawny boasts that he did. Margaret Fuller was a
large-brained, big-hearted woman, but that she and Hawthorne could not
thoroughly fraternize is not a strange thing. We see another instance of
such lack of appreciation of each other's qualities in Henry James and
the Bostonians of the present time. Even the admirers of the Boston type
get a lit