His plan was to add some of the pieces afterward printed with the "The Snow Image," and entitle the whole "Old Time Legends, together with Sketches Experimental and Ideal." But this was abandoned. On the 4th of February, 1850, he writes to Bridge:-- "I finished my book only yesterday: one end being in the press at Boston, while the other was in my head here at Salem; so that, as you see, the story is at least fourteen miles long.... "My book, the publisher tells me, will not be out before April. He speaks of it in tremendous terms of approbation; so does Mrs. Hawthorne, to whom I read the conclusion last night. [Footnote: This recalls an allusion in the English Note-Books (September 14, 1855): "Speaking of Thackeray, I cannot but wonder at his coolness in respect to his own pathos, and compare it with my emotions when I read the last scene of The Scarlet Letter to my wife just after writing it,--tried to read it, rather, for my voice swelled and heaved, as if I were tossed up and down on an ocean as it subsides after a storm. But I was in a very nervous state, then, having gone through a great diversity of emotion while writing it, for many months."] It broke her heart, and sent her to bed with a grievous headache,--which I look upon as a triumphant success. Judging from its effect on her and the publisher, I may calculate on what bowlers calls a 'ten-strike.' But I do not make any such calculation." Now that the author had strongly taken hold of one of the most tangible and terrible of subjects, the public no longer held back. "The Scarlet Letter" met with instant acceptance, and the first edition of five thousand copies was exhausted in ten days. On the old ground of Salem and in the region of New England history where he had won his first triumphs, Hawthorne, no longer the centre of a small public, received the applause of a widespread audience throughout this country, and speedily in Europe too. His old friend, "The London Athenaeum," received "The Scarlet Letter" with very high, though careful praise. But at the same time with this new and wide recognition, an assault was made on the author which it is quite worth while to record here. This was an article in "The Church Review" (an Episcopal quarterly published at New Haven), [Footnote: In the number for January, 1851.] written, I am told, by a then young man who has since reached a high place in the ecclesiastical body to which he belongs. The reviewer, in this case, had in a previous article discussed the question of literary schools in America. Speaking of the origin of the term "Lake School," he pronounced the epithet _Lakers_ "the mere blunder of superficial wit and raillery." But that did not prevent him from creating the absurd title of "Bay writers," which he applied to all the writers about Boston, baptizing them in the profane waters of Massachusetts Bay. "The Church Review" was in the habit of devoting a good deal of its attention to criticism of