Hawthorne's interest in colonial history found its most complete early expression in the "Tales of the Province House," in which he for once succeeded in grouping a series in a natural and effective way so as to make a larger whole. "Sir William Howe's Masquerade" is told by a succession of scenes, quite in the manner described, and the suggestion of mystery, the supernatural intention felt in the incident though not explicitly present in the fact, which in this story attends the last descending figure of the line of royal governors, as it also attended the figure of the Gray Champion, is also in Scott's manner, though more subtly effected. In "Edward Randolph's Portrait" the appearance of the picture on the faded canvas is mechanically accounted for, but at the moment of its discovery this same supernatural expectancy, as it were, is aroused in the beholders; the incident itself recalls the appearance of the portrait of old Lord Ravenswood at the marriage ball of "The Bride of Lammermoor," though the analogy may very likely never have occurred to Hawthorne. "Old Esther Dudley" is hardly more than a character portrait,--the memory of the Province House and all it stood for preserved in the devotion of the old servant into whose life it had passed and whose spirit it occupied like a reliquary of old time. The best of these four tales is "Lady Eleanore's Mantle," and it is so because in it Hawthorne's genius passed out of the sphere of history and touched on that universal moral world where his most original creation was to lie. It is necessary here only to observe that in this tale he has fully seized the power of the physical object, plainly sensible to all as matter of fact, to serve as the medium for moral suggestion often difficult to put into words, of that sort whose effect is rather in the feelings than in thought; and this, without turning the object into an express symbol. The mantle of Lady Eleanore is a garment of pride, and also a garment of death in its dread form of pestilence; the story continually returns to it, as its physical theme, and the imagination fixes upon it by a kind of fascination, as through it the double aspect of Lady Eleanore's isolation is sensibly clothed, her haughtiness and her contagion, whose fatal bond is in this mantle, which finally seems not only to express her life but to rule her tragedy. Here one feels a new power, because while Hawthorne still retains the method of narration he had adopted, he has enriched it with an art and genius distinctly his own. In another tale,--which is provincial if not historical, and which was one of his earlier pieces,--"Roger Malvin's Burial," there is also a noticeable beginning in his art, for in this he uses undesigned coincidence to give that impression of a guided accomplishment of fate, which is so dramatically effective to the moral sense. From these few instances it will be observed that Hawthorne reached artistic