The intention of taking his family at once to Paris was given up, and instead Hawthorne went with them to Manchester, the Lakes, and Scotland, and made a pilgrimage to Warwick and Coventry, besides visiting many other places. The new consul, however, postponed his coming until near the end of 1857. Not before January, 1858, did Hawthorne break away from the fascinations of England and cross to the Continent. When, after spending more than a year and a half in Italy, he again set foot in England, it was to establish himself at Redcar, a sea-side town in Yorkshire, where he finished "The Marble Faun" in October, 1859; and thence he betook himself to Leamington, which had greatly pleased him on a previous visit. Here his old friend, Mr. Hillard, called upon him; and in an article printed in the "Atlantic Monthly," in 1870, he says: "The writer of this notice, who confesses to an insatiable passion for the possession of books, and an omnivorous appetite for their contents, was invited by him into his study, the invitation being accompanied with one of his peculiar and indescribable smiles, in which there lurked a consciousness of his (the writer's) weakness. The study was a small square room, with a table and chair, but absolutely not a single book. He liked writing better than reading." Mr. Hillard's implication, however, is a misleading one. "Hawthorne," says Mr. Fields, "was a hearty devourer of books, and in certain moods of mind it made very little difference what the volume before him happened to be.... He once told me that he found such delight in old advertisements in the newspaper files at the Boston Athenæum, that he had passed delicious hours among them. At other times he was very fastidious, and threw aside book after book, until he found the right one. De Quincey was a favorite with him, and the sermons of Laurence Sterne he once commended to me as the best sermons ever written." His correspondence was not "literary," to be sure; but in his letters to Mr. Fields, who had to do so especially with books, occasional references to literature escape him, which did not ordinarily find their way into his letters to other people. From England, in 1854, he wrote to that gentleman: "I thank you for the books you sent me, and more especially for Mrs. Mowatt's 'Autobiography,' which seems to me an admirable book. Of all things I delight in autobiographies; and I hardly ever read one that interested me so much." He did not read for erudition or for criticism, but he certainly read much, and books were companions to him. I have seen several catalogues of libraries which Hawthorne had marked carefully, proving that, although he made no annotations, he had studied the titles with a natural reader's loving fondness. His stay at Leamington was but a brief one, and for that reason he may well have been without books in his study at the moment; he never crowded them about himself, in the rooms where he worked, but his tower-study at The Wayside always