After his return he published a volume of English sketches, which he entitled “Our Old Home,” but he seems to have felt actually less at home in England than in any other country that he visited. In that book, and also in his diary, the even tenor of his discourse is interrupted here and there by fits of irritability which disclose themselves in the use of epithets such as one would hardly expect from the pen of Hawthorne. If we apply to him the well-known proverb with respect to the Russians, we can imagine that under similar conditions an inherited sailor-like tendency in him came to the surface. We only remember one such instance in his American Note-book, that in which he speaks of Thoreau’s having a face “as homely as sin.” [Footnote: The general effect of Thoreau’s face was by no means unpleasant.] Hawthorne did not carry with him to Europe that narrow provincialism, which asserts itself in either condemning or ridiculing everything that differs essentially from American ways and methods. On the contrary, when he compares the old country with the new,--for instance, the English scenery with that of New England,--Hawthorne is usually as fair, discriminating, and dispassionate as any one could wish, and perhaps more so than some would desire. His judgment cannot be questioned in preferring the American elm, with its wine-glass shape, to the rotund European species; but he admires the English lake country above anything that he has seen like it in his own land. “Centuries of cultivation have given the English oak a domestic character,” while American trees are still to be classed with the wild flowers which bloom beneath their outstretched arms.