the perception of some innate consistency, on opening to the very first sentence in his volume of Remains, and finding the master's name: "I have been all my life what Nathaniel Hawthorne calls 'a devoted epicure of my own emotions.'" That, I suppose, was written about 1854, when Hawthorne's first long romance had been published scarcely four years, and shows a remarkable power in the young disciple of finding his literary kinship. Indeed, not the least of his resemblances to Hawthorne is the fact that he seems from the first to have possessed a native sense of style; what other men toil for was theirs by right of birth. In the earliest of these sketches the cadenced rhythms of _John Inglesant_ are already present, lacking a little, perhaps, in the perfect assurance that came later, but still unmistakable. And at times--in _The Autumn Walk_, for instance, with its "attempt to find language for nameless sights and voices," in _Sundays at the Seaside_, with their benediction of outpoured light upon the waters, offering to the beholder as it were the sacrament of beauty, or in the _Recollections of a London Church_,--at times, I say, we seem almost to be reading some lost or discarded chapter of the finished romance. This closing paragraph of the _Recollections_, written apparently when Shorthouse was not much more than a boy--might it not be a memory of King Charles's cavalier himself?-- Certes, it was very strange that the story of this young girl whom I have never seen, whom I knew so little of, should haunt me thus. Yet for her sake I loved the church and the trees and even the dark and dingy houses round about; and as with the small congregation I listened to the refrain of that sublime litany which sounded forth, word for word, as she had heard it, I thought it all the more divine because I knew so certainly that in her days of trouble and affliction it had supported and comforted her: By Thine agony and bloody sweat; by Thy cross and passion; by Thy precious death and burial; by Thy glorious resurrection and ascension; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost, Good Lord deliver us.