s none of the apparatus of an historian, and his shadowy
style of portraiture never suggests a rigid standard of accuracy.
Nevertheless he virtually offers the most vivid reflection of New
England life that has found its way into literature. His value in this
respect is not diminished by the fact that he has not attempted to
portray the usual Yankee of comedy, and that he has been almost
culpably indifferent to his opportunities for commemorating the
variations of colloquial English that may be observed in the New
World. His characters do not express themselves in the dialect of the
_Biglow Papers_--their language indeed is apt to be too elegant, too
delicate. They are not portraits of actual types, and in their
phraseology there is nothing imitative. But none the less, Hawthorne's
work savours thoroughly of the local soil--it is redolent of the
social system in which he had his being.

This could hardly fail to be the case, when the man himself was so
deeply rooted in the soil. Hawthorne sprang from the primitive New
England stock; he had a very definite and conspicuous pedigree. He was
born at Salem, Massachusetts, on the 4th of July, 1804, and his
birthday was the great American festival, the anniversary of the
Declaration of national Independence.[1] Hawthorne was in his
disposition an unqualified and unflinching American; he found occasion
to give us the measure of the fact during the seven years that he
spent in Europe toward the close of his life; and this was no more
than proper on the part of a man who had enjoyed the honour of coming
into the world on the day on which of all the days in the year the
great Republic enjoys her acutest fit of self-consciousness. Moreover,
a person who has been ushered into life by the ringing of bells and
the booming of cannon (unless indeed he be frightened straight out of
it again by the uproar of his awakening) receives by this very fact an
injunction to do something great, something that will justify such
striking natal accompaniments. Hawthorne was by race of the clearest
Puritan strain. His earliest American ancestors (who wrote the name
"Hathorne"--the shape in which it was transmitted to Nathaniel, who
inserted the _w_,) was the younger son of a Wiltshire family, whose
residence, according to a note of our author's in 1837, was
"Wigcastle, Wigton." Hawthorne, in the note in question, mentions the
gentleman who was at that time the head of the family; but it does not
appe