Hawthorne's atmosphere was really unhealthy for transcendentalists. No doubt his dislike of Margaret Fuller arose from this feeling of his that she was always acting a part, always straining after an effect. He loved simple, natural, unaffected people, and the part of a sibyl was very distasteful to him. He suspected the inspiration of green tea in much that Margaret said, and very ungallantly pronounced her a humbug. But as he did this only upon the paper of his own private diary, with no thought of it ever being paraded before a critical and captious world, we should not blame him too severely. And if he was mistaken in what he wrote concerning her husband and her life in Rome, as seems to be the fact, no doubt he was deceived by gossip-loving friends in Rome concerning the matter. One does not write gratuitous falsehoods upon the pages of one's private notebook about acquaintances, as a general rule. If he had desired to injure Margaret he would have put his supposed facts in a different place, no doubt, and not merely written them in a moment of spleen where he never expected them to be seen. The publication of such comment as this, and Carlyle's mention of Charles Lamb and others, seems to be due entirely to the total depravity of literary executors. As George Eliot says, it is like uncovering the dead Byron's club-foot, when he had been so sensitive about it through life, as his friend Trelawny boasts that he did. Margaret Fuller was a large-brained, big-hearted woman, but that she and Hawthorne could not thoroughly fraternize is not a strange thing. We see another instance of such lack of appreciation of each other's qualities in Henry James and the Bostonians of the present time. Even the admirers of the Boston type get a little quiet amusement from his delicious satire, although their admiration of the reformers may remain unshaken. That the world has got a little weary of the mutual admiration of the Boston coterie is an open secret. We have had a trifle too much of it from the day of Fields, who apparently invented Hawthorne, and would have put a patent upon him if possible, down to the present era of worship of that real hero, Emerson who, if he survives the laudations of his present army of admirers, may well hope for immortality. The wife of Hawthorne was so different a person from the noble army of literary and artistic women who are so numerous to-day, but who in his time had just begun to assert themselves, that, believing her to be the perfect flower of womanhood, as he did, he could scarcely be expected to appreciate the Zenobias of that or of the present time. Mrs. Hawthorne's sister, Elizabeth Peabody, was one of the women of the new era, and has spent her entire life in noble efforts to improve the world into which she was born; and who shall say whether Mrs. Hawthorne or Miss Peabody was the higher type of woman?