This is the climax of the _Atlantic_ critique, and its anti-climax is an excoriation of Hawthorne’s son for neglecting to do equal and exact justice to James T. Fields. This truly is a grievous accusation. Fields was Hawthorne’s publisher and would seem to have taken a personal and friendly interest in him besides, but we cannot look on it as a wholly unselfish interest. It was not like Hillard’s, Pierce’s, and Bridge’s interest in Hawthorne. If Fields had not been his publisher, it is not probable that Hawthorne would have made his acquaintance; and if his son has not enlarged on Fields’s good offices in bringing “The Scarlet Letter” before the public, there is an excellent reason for it, in the fact that Fields had already done so for himself in his “Yesterdays with Authors.” That Fields’s name should have been omitted in the index to “Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife,” may have been an oversight; but, at all events, it is too microscopic a matter to deserve consideration in a first-class review. Are we become such babies, that it is no longer possible for a writer to tell the plain, ostensible truth concerning human nature, without having a storm raised about his head for it? George P. Bradford and Martin F. Tupper are similar instances, and like Boswell have suffered the penalty which accrues to men of small stature for associating with giants. APPENDIX C The great poets and other writers of all nations whom I conceive to be superior to Hawthorne, may be found in the following list: Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Pindar, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Theocritus, Plutarch; Horace, Virgil, Cicero, Tacitus; Dante, Tasso, Petrarch; Cervantes, Calderon, Camoens; Molière, Racine, Descartes, Voltaire; Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kant; Swedenborg; Chaucer, Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, and perhaps Burns and Byron; Alexander Hamilton, Napoleon.