allegories, since the characters are men and women and not mere personifications of abstract qualities. Still, they all have a certain allegorical tinge. In the _Marble Faun_, for example, Hilda, Kenyon, Miriam, and Donatello have been ingeniously explained as personifications respectively of the conscience, the reason, the imagination, and the senses. Without going so far as this, it is possible to see in these and in Hawthorne's other creations something typical and representative. He uses his characters like algebraic symbols to work out certain problems with; they are rather more and yet rather less than flesh and blood individuals. The stories in _Twice-Told Tales_ and in the second collection, _Mosses from an Old Manse_, 1846, are more openly allegorical than his later work. Thus the _Minister's Black Veil_ is a sort of anticipation of Arthur Dimmesdale in the _Scarlet Letter_. From 1846 to 1849 Hawthorne held the position of surveyor of the Custom House of Salem. In the preface to the _Scarlet Letter_ he sketched some of the government officials with whom this office had brought him into contact in a way that gave some offense to the friends of the victims and a great deal of amusement to the public. Hawthorne's humor was quiet and fine, like Irving's, but less genial and with a more satiric edge to it. The book last named was written at Salem and published in 1850, just before its author's removal to Lenox, now a sort of inland Newport, but then an unfashionable resort among the Berkshire hills. Whatever obscurity may have hung over Hawthorne hitherto was effectually dissolved by this powerful tale, which was as vivid in coloring as the implication of its title. Hawthorne chose for his background the somber life of the early settlers of New England. Ho had always been drawn toward this part of American history, and in _Twice-Told Tales_ had given some illustrations of it in _Endicott's Red Cross_ and _Legends of the Province House_. Against this dark foil moved in strong relief the figures of Hester Prynne, the woman taken in adultery; her paramour, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale; her husband, old Roger Chillingworth; and her illegitimate child. In tragic power, in its grasp of the elementary passions of human nature and its deep and subtle insight into the inmost secrets of the heart, this is Hawthorne's greatest book. He never crowded his canvas with figures. In the _Blithedale Romance_ and the _Marble Faun_ there is the same _parti carre_ or group of four characters. In the _House of the Seven Gables_ there are five. The last mentioned of these, published in 1852, was of a more subdued intensity than the _Scarlet Letter_, but equally original, and, upon the whole, perhaps equally good. The _Blithedale Romance_, published in the same year, though not strikingly inferior to the others, adhered more to conventional patterns in its plot and in the sensational nature of its ending.