"Before undertaking it, I made an inward resolution that I would accept no office from him; but to say the truth, I doubt whether it would not be rather folly than heroism to adhere to this purpose, in case he should offer me anything particularly good. We shall see. A foreign mission I could not afford to take;--the consulship at Liverpool I might.... I have several invitations from English celebrities to come over there; and this office would make all straight. He certainly owes me something; for the biography has cost me hundreds of friends here at the North, who had a purer regard for me than Frank Pierce or any other politician ever gained, and who drop off from me like autumn leaves, in consequence of what I say on the slavery question. But they were my real sentiments, and I do not now regret that they are on record." After discussing other topics, he observes further of Pierce: "I have come seriously to the conclusion that he has in him many of the chief elements of a great man; and that if he wins the election he may run a great career. His talents are administrative; he has a subtle faculty of making affairs roll around according to his will, and of influencing their course without showing any trace of his action." Hawthorne did not feel very confident of his friend's election. "I love him," he adds, "and, oddly enough, there is a kind of pitying sentiment mixed with my affection for him just now." * * * * * Mr. Richard Henry Stoddard has set down his reminiscences of two visits paid to Hawthorne at the beginning and after the end of the campaign. In the summer of 1852, Mr. Stoddard was making a short stay in Boston, and dropped in at the Old Corner Bookstore to call upon Mr. Fields, who then had his headquarters there. He found Mr. Edwin P. Whipple, the lecturer and critic, sitting with the publisher. "'We are going to see Hawthorne,' Mr. Fields remarked, in an off-hand way, as if such a visit was the commonest thing in the world. 'Won't you come along?' He knew my admiration for Hawthorne, and that I desired to meet him, if I could do so without being considered an infliction. 'To be sure I will,' I replied.... When we were fairly seated in the train we met a friend of Hawthorne, whom Mr. Fields knew--a Colonel T. I. Whipple--who, like ourselves, was _en route_ for Concord, ... and as General Pierce was then the democratic candidate for the presidency, he was going to see Hawthorne, in order to furnish materials for that work.