Conway remarks very justly that an American author could not be expected to earn his own living in a country where foreign books could be pirated as they were in the United States until 1890, and this was especially true during the popularity of Dickens and George Eliot. Dickens was the great humanitarian writer of the nineteenth century, but he was also a caricaturist and a bohemian. He did not represent life as it is, but with a certain comical oddity. As an author he is to Hawthorne what a peony is to a rose, or a garnet is to a ruby; but ten, persons would purchase a novel of Dickens when one would select the “Twice Told Tales.” Scott and Tennyson are exceptional instances of a high order of literary work which also proved fairly remunerative; but they do not equal Hawthorne in grace of diction and in the rare quality of his thought,--whatever advantages they may possess in other respects. Thackeray earned his living by his pen, but it was only in England that he could have done this. CHAPTER VI PEGASUS AT THE CART: 1839-1841 Horatio Bridge’s dam was washed away in the spring of 1837, by a sudden and unprecedented rising of the Androscoggin River. Bridge was financially ruined, but like a brave and generous young man he did not permit this stroke of evil fortune, severe as it was, to oppress him heavily, and Hawthorne seems to have felt no shadow of it during his visit to Augusta the following summer. He returned to Salem in August with pleasanter anticipations than ever before,--to enjoy the society of his _fiancée_, and to prepare the second volume of “Twice Told Tales.” The course of Hawthorne’s life during the next twenty months is mostly a blank to us. He would seem to have exerted himself to escape from the monotone in which he had been living so long, but of his efforts, disappointments, and struggles against the giant coils of Fate, there is no report. He wrote the four Province House tales as a send-off to his second volume, as well as “The Toll-Gatherer’s Day,” “Footprints on the Seashore,” “Snow-Flakes,” and “Chippings with a Chisel,” which are to be found in it. [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, 176.] There is a long blank in Hawthorne’s diary during the winter of 1837-38 which may be owing to his indifference to the outer world at that time, but more likely because its contents have not yet been revealed to us. It was the period of Cilley’s duel, and what Hawthorne’s reflections were on that subject, aside from the account which he wrote for the _Democratic Review_, would be highly interesting now, but the absence of any reference to it is significant, and there is no published entry in his diary between December 6, 1837, and May 11, 1838.