nius, imagination, and, as our
forefathers said, sensibility, would at present inevitably accommodate
himself more easily to the idiosyncrasies of foreign lands. An
American as cultivated as Hawthorne, is now almost inevitably more
cultivated, and, as a matter of course, more Europeanised in advance,
more cosmopolitan. It is very possible that in becoming so, he has
lost something of his occidental savour, the quality which excites the
goodwill of the American reader of our author's Journals for the
dislocated, depressed, even slightly bewildered diarist. Absolutely
the last of the earlier race of Americans Hawthorne was, fortunately,
probably far from being. But I think of him as the last specimen of
the more primitive type of men of letters; and when it comes to
measuring what he succeeded in being, in his unadulterated form,
against what he failed of being, the positive side of the image quite
extinguishes the negative. I must be on my guard, however, against
incurring the charge of cherishing a national consciousness as acute
as I have ventured to pronounce his own.

Out of his mingled sensations, his pleasure and his weariness, his
discomforts and his reveries, there sprang another beautiful work.
During the summer of 1858, he hired a picturesque old villa on the
hill of Bellosguardo, near Florence, a curious structure with a
crenelated tower, which, after having in the course of its career
suffered many vicissitudes and played many parts, now finds its most
vivid identity in being pointed out to strangers as the sometime
residence of the celebrated American romancer. Hawthorne took a fancy
to the place, as well he might, for it is one of the loveliest spots
on earth, and the great view that stretched itself before him contains
every element of beauty. Florence lay at his feet with her memories
and treasures; the olive-covered hills bloomed around him, studded
with villas as picturesque as his own; the Apennines, perfect in form
and colour, disposed themselves opposite, and in the distance, along
its fertile valley, the Arno wandered to Pisa and the sea. Soon after
coming hither he wrote to a friend in a strain of high satisfaction:--

"It is pleasant to feel at last that I am really away from
America--a satisfaction that I never really enjoyed as long
as I stayed in Liverpool, where it seemed to be that the
quintessence of nasal and hand-shaking Yankeedom was
gradually filtered and subli