_Nathaniel Hawthorne._--The greatest genius among American writers of romance, by many held to be the supreme literary artist of America, was Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was peculiarly a product of New England and frankly admitted that New England was quite as large a lump of earth as his heart could take in. His ancestor, William Hathorne, came to the New World in 1630, in the ship with John Winthrop and Thomas Dudley, and became a leader in the colony. Hathorne’s son John was one of the judges in the witchcraft trials at Salem in 1691. The grandfather and father of Nathaniel Hawthorne were both sea-captains. The novelist was born at Salem on July 4, 1804. Four years later, his father, never apparently a robust man, died at Surinam, and the widowed mother began to live in a deep seclusion which could not fail to have its effect upon the quick sensibilities of her son. In 1818, the family removed to Raymond, on the shore of Sebago Lake, in Maine, where his grandfather Manning owned large tracts of land. Hawthorne’s boyhood environment, therefore, was not widely different from that of Fenimore Cooper. But he was more of a reader than Cooper. As a boy, he became familiar with Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan, Clarendon, Froissart, Rousseau, and Godwin. Entering Bowdoin College, he was graduated in 1825 in the class with Longfellow. While he did not distinguish himself in his studies, he became a respectable Latin and English scholar; and he devoted much time to reading in the little library of the Athenæan Society. At graduation, he ranked eighteenth in a class of thirty-eight. Meanwhile his family had returned to Salem, and thither Hawthorne now went, to begin a period of literary apprenticeship. It was seemingly a bold undertaking to attempt to live by his pen; however, he seems to have drifted into the attempt through aversion to a more active life. In 1828, he published anonymously a novel called “Fanshawe,” dealing with some of his college experiences and recalling vaguely the methods of Scott. Some characters, it must be said, are vigorously conceived, and here and there the volume gave promise of the author’s future skill; but there is about the whole a suggestion of unreality, not to say crudeness. The book found, as it deserved, an indifferent public, and Hawthorne subsequently recalled as many copies as he could procure and burned them. For several years, he continued to live in seclusion, contributing stories and sketches to various annuals and periodicals. For the stories he got $35 each. In March, 1837, having been encouraged by his friend Horatio Bridge, he published the first volume to appear with his name, “Twice-Told Tales.” They were eighteen in number, being only half of the stories he is known to have printed up to this time. The “Tales” gave Hawthorne a considerable reputation; Longfellow praised it in _The North American Review_, then influential in literary affairs. Again helped by his