The Judge Pyncheon of the story has been pronounced ‘somewhat of a stage villain, a puppet.’ This may possibly be due less to Hawthorne’s handling of the character than to the inherent weakness of the hypocrite as presented in fiction or drama. The patrician old woman turned shop-keeper is so perfect a study that praise of the delineation is almost an impertinence. And there is the great silent but living and breathing House of the Seven Gables, in the creation of which Hawthorne expended the wealth of his powers. It will always be a question whether in the spiritual significance he attaches to or draws from some physical fact this great literary artist does not show his highest power. And many a time one finishes the reading of this particular book with the feeling that the House of the Seven Gables is the real protagonist of the drama. In respect that it is a beautiful example of Hawthorne’s art _The Blithedale Romance_ is deserving of all the praise lavished upon it; in respect that it is a picture of Brook Farm it is naught. The author himself freely admitted that he chose the socialist community merely as a theatre where the creatures of his brain might ‘play their phantas-magorical antics’ without their being exposed to the rigid test of ‘too close a comparison with the actual events of real lives.’ The antics played are such as we witness daily when human puppets are swayed by various passions of love, jealousy, self-will, pride, humility, the instinct for art, or the instinct for reform. The bearded Hollingsworth, whose ‘dark shaggy face looked really beautiful with its expression of thoughtful benevolence,’ was, without being conscious of it, a brutal egoist, capable of bending all people and all things to the accomplishment of his idea. He illustrates the weakness of strength, as Priscilla, so frail, nervous, and impressionable, illustrates the strength of weakness. That Hawthorne intended to show in Coverdale the insufficiency of the profession of minor poet to make anything of a man, we shall not pretend; but his distrust of the worth of literature is well known. Coverdale’s failure was no greater than Hollingsworth’s, and he at least never played with hearts. Zenobia is at once the most human, the most attractive, and the most pathetic figure in the drama. ‘But yet a woman,’ and too much woman, so that her imperial beauty and grace, her wealth, her skill to command, her magnetic charm, and her intellectual gifts were insufficient to save her. No less regal in endowment than was Hester Prynne, she sank under a burden infinitely lighter than Hester’s. Her nature was strong but impulsive, and impulsiveness was Zenobia’s ruin.