He did not enjoy England so much, however, as this might seem to indicate; and, especially, he did not enjoy his work, for, notwithstanding his philosophy of the usefulness of manual toil and regular occupation of an unliterary kind, the touch of work always disenchanted his mind at once. He liked it no better than on the two previous occasions at Boston and Salem; it bored and wearied him, and just as before, though he does not now complain of the fact, it put an end to his literary activity, paralyzed and sterilized his genius as completely as if it had blasted him with a curse. The difficulty of serving two masters, though it is sometimes thought to be a service peculiarly fitted for men of letters, was illustrated in Hawthorne's career in many ways and on several occasions, but nowhere more plainly than in the period of his five years of atrophy from the time he entered the consulate till the composition of "The Marble Faun." He wrote vigorously in his note-books, from time to time, but such composition was the opiate it had always been for his higher imaginative and moral powers, and exercised only his faculty of observation. The fact that he does not complain of this state of affairs is due probably to his growing weariness of higher literary effort, the true power of his genius, which now had only an ebbing physical force for its basis. He was too much engaged in affairs, and too tired, to write; but he was not displeased to have so good an excuse, and perhaps his ambition was already really satisfied by the success he had achieved, and he felt the spur less. Altogether, the first and lasting impression made by his account of his life at Liverpool is that he was the same discontented employee who had chafed against circumstances before, and had not changed his mind with the skies over him. The expression of his moods has the old touch of irritability, too, in its excess of language, its air of confiding something that one would not say aloud, its half-conscious pettishness. In March, 1854, he writes to Bridge, in this character, though here possibly it is the presence of politics that is the disturbing factor:-- "I like my office well enough, but any official duties and obligations are irksome to me beyond expression. Nevertheless, the emoluments will be a sufficient inducement to keep me here, though they are not above a quarter part what some people suppose them.