and Pecksniff) in "Martin Chuzzlewit." The person of
Roger Chillingworth and his conduct are a little too melodramatic for
Hawthorne's genius.

In Dickens's manner, too, is Hawthorne's long sarcastic address to Judge
Pyncheon (in "The House of the Seven Gables"), as the judge sits dead in
his chair, with his watch ticking in his hand. Occasionally a chance
remark reminds one of Dickens; this for example: He is talking of large,
black old books of divinity, and of their successors, tiny books,
Elzevirs perhaps. "These little old volumes impressed me as if they had
been intended for very large ones, but had been unfortunately blighted at
an early stage of their growth." This might almost deceive the elect as
a piece of the true Boz. Their widely different talents did really
intersect each other where the perverse, the grotesque, and the terrible
dwell.

To myself "The House of the Seven Gables" has always appeared the most
beautiful and attractive of Hawthorne's novels. He actually gives us a
love story, and condescends to a pretty heroine. The curse of "Maule's
Blood" is a good old romantic idea, terribly handled. There is more of
lightness, and of a cobwebby dusty humour in Hepzibah Pyncheon, the
decayed lady shopkeeper, than Hawthorne commonly cares to display. Do
you care for the "first lover," the Photographer's Young Man? It may be
conventional prejudice, but I seem to see him going about on a tricycle,
and I don't think him the right person for Phoebe. Perhaps it is really
the beautiful, gentle, oppressed Clifford who haunts one's memory most, a
kind of tragic and thwarted Harold Skimpole. "How pleasant, how
delightful," he murmured, but not as if addressing any one. "Will it
last? How balmy the atmosphere through that open window! An open
window! How beautiful that play of sunshine. Those flowers, how very
fragrant! That young girl's face, how cheerful, how blooming. A flower
with the dew on it, and sunbeams in the dewdrops . . . " This comparison
with Skimpole may sound like an unkind criticism of Clifford's character
and place in the story--it is only a chance note of a chance resemblance.

Indeed, it may be that Hawthorne himself was aware of the resemblance.
"An individual of Clifford's character," he remarks, "can always be
pricked more acutely through his sense of the beautiful and harmonious
than through his heart." And he suggests that, if Clifford had not been
so long in prison, his