esidue of wisdom which might be applied to his own ulterior uses.
These were indirect and incidental issues; but from the consulate qua
consulate Hawthorne was radically alien, and when he quitted it, he
carried away with him no taint or trace of it. As he says in his remarks
upon the subject, he soon came to doubt whether it were actually himself
who had been the incumbent of the office at all.

But Providence does not deny manna to man in his extremity, and to my
father it came in the shape of a few English friends, and in occasional
escapes from the office into the outside England where, after the
centuries of separation, he found so much with which he could still feel
profoundly akin. His most constant friendly visitor was Henry A. Bright,
a university man, the son of a wealthy local merchant, who sent ships
to Australia, and was related (as most agreeable Englishmen are--though
there are shining exceptions) to the aristocratic class. Bright, at this
time, could not have been over thirty years of age; he was intensely
English, though his slender figure and mental vivacity might make him
seem near to the conventional American type. But through him, as through
an open window, Hawthorne was enabled to see far into the very heart of
England. Bright not merely knew England; he was England, and England at
its best, and therefore also at its most insular and prejudiced. It
was unspeakably satisfying and agreeable to encounter a man at once so
uncompromising and so amiable, so wrong-headed (from the American point
of view) and so right-hearted. He was drawn to my father as iron is
drawn to the magnet; on every outward point they fought each other like
the knight errants of old, while agreeing inwardly, beneath the surface
of things, as few friends are able to agree. Each admired the other's
onslaughts and his prowess, and, by way of testifying his admiration,
strove to excel himself in his counter attacks. The debate was always
beginning, and in the nature of things it could never end; the effect
of their blows was only to hammer each the other more firmly into his
previous convictions. Probably all the things that are English and all
the things that are American never before or since received such full
and trenchant exposition as was given them by Hawthorne and by Bright.
The whole subject of monarchy and aristocracy as against republicanism
and democracy was threshed out to the last kernel by champions each of
whom was tho