ure as a man of war and
peace--a stronger claim than for myself, whose name is
seldom heard and my face hardly known. He was a soldier,
legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the church; he had all
the Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was likewise a
bitter persecutor, as witness the Quakers, who have
remembered him in their histories, and relate an incident of
his hard severity towards a woman of their sect which will
last longer, it is to be feared, than any of his better
deeds, though these were many."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: It is proper that before I go further I should
acknowledge my large obligations to the only biography of our author,
of any considerable length, that has been written--the little volume
entitled _A Study of Hawthorne_, by Mr. George Parsons Lathrop, the
son-in-law of the subject of the work. (Boston, 1876.) To this
ingenious and sympathetic sketch, in which the author has taken great
pains to collect the more interesting facts of Hawthorne's life, I am
greatly indebted. Mr. Lathrop's work is not pitched in the key which
many another writer would have chosen, and his tone is not to my sense
the truly critical one; but without the help afforded by his elaborate
essay the present little volume could not have been prepared.]

William Hathorne died in 1681; but those hard qualities that his
descendant speaks of were reproduced in his son John, who bore the
title of Colonel, and who was connected, too intimately for his
honour, with that deplorable episode of New England history, the
persecution of-the so-called Witches of Salem. John Hathorne is
introduced into the little drama entitled _The Salem Farms_ in
Longfellow's _New England Tragedies_. I know not whether he had the
compensating merits of his father, but our author speaks of him, in
the continuation of the passage I have just quoted, as having made
himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their
blood may be said to have left a stain upon him. "So deep a stain,
indeed," Hawthorne adds, characteristically, "that his old dry bones
in the Charter Street burial-ground must still retain it, if they have
not crumbled utterly to dust." Readers of _The House of the Seven
Gables_ will remember that the story concerns itself with a family
which is supposed to be overshadowed by a curse launched against one
of its earlier members by a poor man occupying a lowlier place in the
wo