ity in his belonging to the other party. He
was not only by conviction, but personally and by association, a
Democrat. When in later years he found himself in contact with
European civilisation, he appears to have become conscious of a good
deal of latent radicalism in his disposition; he was oppressed with
the burden of antiquity in Europe, and he found himself sighing for
lightness and freshness and facility of change. But these things are
relative to the point of view, and in his own country Hawthorne cast
his lot with the party of conservatism, the party opposed to change
and freshness. The people who found something musty and mouldy in his
literary productions would have regarded this quite as a matter of
course; but we are not obliged to use invidious epithets in describing
his political preferences. The sentiment that attached him to the
Democracy was a subtle and honourable one, and the author of an
attempt to sketch a portrait of him, should be the last to complain of
this adjustment of his sympathies. It falls much more smoothly into
his reader's conception of him than any other would do; and if he had
had the perversity to be a Republican, I am afraid our ingenuity would
have been considerably taxed in devising a proper explanation of the
circumstance. At any rate, the Democrats gave him a small post in the
Boston Custom-house, to which an annual salary of $1,200 was attached,
and Hawthorne appears at first to have joyously welcomed the gift. The
duties of the office were not very congruous to the genius of a man of
fancy; but it had the advantage that it broke the spell of his cursed
solitude, as he called it, drew him away from Salem, and threw him,
comparatively speaking, into the world. The first volume of the
American Note-Books contains some extracts from letters written during
his tenure of this modest office, which indicate sufficiently that his
occupations cannot have been intrinsically gratifying.

"I have been measuring coal all day," he writes, during the
winter of 1840, "on board of a black little British
schooner, in a dismal dock at the north end of the city.
Most of the time I paced the deck to keep myself warm; for
the wind (north-east, I believe) blew up through the dock as
if it had been the pipe of a pair of bellows. The vessel
lying deep between two wharves, there was no more delightful
prospect, on the right hand and on the left, than the posts