The writer has a copy of this respectable and for a time popular monthly, with which he would be reluctant to part. It contains, for the first time printed, "The White Old Maid," one of the weirdest and most fascinating of the "Twice-Told Tales." My present object is to invite the notice of readers of the "New England Magazine" of our day to the last completed work from the hand of that man of marvellous genius, "Which at its topmost speed let fall the pen, And left the tale half told." I remember with what concern I once heard a resident of Concord, a man not unknown in the world of letters, speak of certain evils likely to result from "Hawthorne's fall." This, to me, conveyed only the idea of physical disaster, and it was with a sentiment of relief, commensurate with the contempt inspired by such an explanation, that I was given to understand that it was the great author's unselfish effort in behalf of his old college comrade and life-long friend, that was supposed to imply a state of moral declension fitly indicated by the sinister word. It was thus that men and women, full of the cheap patriotism of the time, and puffed up with a sort of loyal egotism that blinded them to the possibilities of honest purpose in any whose views on politics and public affairs varied never so slightly from their accepted standard of right, ventured to condemn what they were constitutionally incapable of judging with either coolness or fair appreciation. The "Life of Franklin Pierce" is by no means a great book, and neither the subject nor its treatment entitles it to a place among the immortal works that preceded and followed it; but to those of us who knew and loved the writer, and to those who through his books got some glimpses of the singular purity of his moral nature, a quality of friendship that excludes the idea of selfish interest seems its author's only and sufficient motive. When the storm of civil war broke upon us, these worthy critics flung themselves with tongue, or pen, or sword--chiefly with tongue--into the good cause, and were scandalized at the vision of one who would fain have dreamed while they, after their various methods, were fighting; of a poet so far aloft in the regions of ideal fancy that the confused voices of battle well-nigh failed to reach him. And yet, in the words of one of their own writers, "There was but one man living whom the country could so ill afford to lose as this strange, wayward, fitful, unreasonable poet and dreamer, who sneered at the war, and at the great nation that waged it, with the pettishness of a spoiled child." But the charge that Hawthorne sneered at the righteous war, or, far worse, at his country, is full of an injustice which seems more bitter because it comes from one whose hearty admiration of the AUTHOR should have lifted him to a clearer appreciation of the MAN in his purity and lofty patriotism.