as that of the old ancestor and founder of the family, whose picture hangs above the chair."*

The Blithedale Romancet is founded upon the author's experience in the community at Brook Farm. Its object is to delineate the disastrous consequences of allowing one's philanthropical inclinations to become developed into a mania inducing the sacrifice of personal rights and privileges. The story ends with the sad picture of a man of superior intellect and noble impulses utterly crushed by the failure of his most unselfish schemes, and unable to recover or rally his conscience into action. Hawthorne wrote also The Marble Faun, Our Old Home, and many shorter tales and sketches. All these show the impress of a master-hand.

Says an American critic: "Few men have written, in our day, of such true originality and genius as Nathaniel Hawthorne. He seized upon the dry and barren scenes and traditions of New England life, which to most minds seemed utterly destitute of all features of poetry or romance, and, touching them with the magic of his fancy, transformed them into realms of beauty and chronicles of wild mystery that are scarcely surpassed in the pages of any fiction that has been written in any time. The chambers of his tales are crowded with many grim and ghastly visions; they are full of moth and rust, of cobwebs and thick-piled dust; the atmosphere is often heavy with suggestions of horror, and the reader advances with a thrill of terror. But there are also everywhere passages of wonderful and tender beauty, descriptions as minute in detail as the rarest photographs, bringing back the old time and the men and women who lived in it as vividly and life-like as the people whom the reader meets in his every-day walks."

An English critic says: "There is in his works a certain kind of inconclusiveness which may be called the brand of the Hawthorne genius. The way in which it most

* R. H. Hutton: Essays, Theological and Literary. † 1852.

powerfully works is this: He never allows you to make up your mind, and seems never to have made up his own, whether there is a preternatural element at work in the narrative or not. The manner in which he takes up a wild tradition or an awful superstition, or some startling, unexplained phenomena, and impacts, so to speak, ordinary events and persons into such things, is familiar to all his readers. His scenery and his persons are wrought out with the utmost distinctness, but every now and then he lets down a curtain of lurid haze all round, or sends a shudder over the page, before you well know where you are. In Hawthorne's mind everything seemed capable of meaning something else, and the endless filaments of suggestion sent out in search of symbolic meanings-you can see them trembling all round at every capture like a spider's web."

Says Lowell, in his Fable for Critics:

"There is Hawthorne with genius so shrinking and rare
That you hardly at first see the strength that is there;
A frame so robust, with a nature so sweet,

So earnest, so graceful, so solid, so fleet,
Is worth a descent from Olympus to meet;

"T is as if a rough oak that for ages had stood,
With his gnarled bony branches like ribs of the wood,
Should bloom, after cycles of struggle and scathe,
With a single anemone trembly and rathe;
His strength is so tender, his wildness so meek,
That a suitable parallel sets one to seek,-
He's a John Bunyan Fouqué, a Puritan Tieck;
When Nature was shaping him, clay was not granted
For making so full-sized a man as she wanted,
So to fill out her model, a little she spared

From some finer-grained stuff for a woman prepared,
And she could not have hit a more excellent plan
For making him fully and perfectly man."

And here let us bring our brief study of the English novel to a close. In the line of prose fiction a greater

number of writers have attempted to attain distinction than in any other department of literature. Novels and novelists are as numerous "as the locusts of Egypt;" the subjects which they attempt to treat seem inexhaustible; the manner and style of treatment seem capable of infinite variation. We have been able to introduce the student only to the masterpieces in this division of fiction, and to the master-minds which produced them. Should he desire to continue his studies beyond the limits indicated by our brief outline, he will find amusement and food for thought in the various types of fiction represented by the host of writers whom we have not been able even to name. Would he continue the study of English manners, traits, habits, and scenery, already begun under Lord Lytton and Disraeli and Theodore Hook and Dickens and George Eliot, let him read the novels of the Trollopes,-mother and sons, of Douglas Jerrold, of Miss Martineau, of Horace Smith, of Mrs. Craik, of Miss Sewell, of George MacDonald, of William Black, and of many others almost equally famous; would he supplement the tales of Scott by inquiring further into the history and the social traits of the people of Scotland, let him read the half-forgotten novels of Professor Wilson, of J. G. Lockhart, of David Macbeth Moir, of John Galt, or of Miss Ferrier. Would he carry on his investigations of Irish wrongs and his studies of Irish character, so well begun with Miss Edgeworth, he should not neglect the stories of Gerald Griffin and the rattling romances of Charles Lever. Should American fiction claim his more serious attention, he will find there a broad field for study and one fertile in interest: James Kirk Paulding and Washington Irving will portray for him the quaint life and manners of the Dutch in the early days of New York; William Gilmore Simms will relate romantic stories of the ancient régime in the South; John P. Kennedy will afford him a pleasant insight into aspects of colonial life in Maryland and Virginia; Edward Eggleston will amuse him with homely

pictures of Hoosierdom in pioneer days; Bret Harte, with a vividness and genuine native force never yet excelled, will acquaint him with the characteristic manners and civilization of the Pacific slope; Constance Fenimore Woolson will depict life and scenery on the great lakes; and other writers, of equal celebrity and not inferior excellence, will delineate every imaginable phase of human existence-local manners, domestic traits, fashionable life, incidents tragical and commonplace-in every nook and corner of this great country. Would our student investigate the more profound development of fiction, its more artistic features, its influence upon society and human affairs, he will find, in addition to the works we have already mentioned, materials sufficient for the study of a life-time. The lover of the marvelous and of the apparently preternatural will revel in the weird stories of Edgar Allen Poe. The psychologist will discover in Dr. Holmes's Elsie Venner something of deeper interest than a mere story of New England life. The historian will recognize in Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin one of the most potent influences leading to the abolition of slavery. The scholar will find in the neglected classical tales of William Ware an exhibition of taste and learning which not only pleases but elevates and improves. The humorist will find comfort and delight in the pages of Mark Twain. The lover of the sensational will gloat over the thrilling recitals of love and intrigue and mystery and murder abounding in the novels of Mrs. Southworth and Miss Braddon. In a word, there is no one, whatever his tastes or his attainments, who may not find matter for amusement, instruction, study, and edification in this department of English Prose Literature.

REFERENCES.

See list at close of Chapter VIII.

CHAPTER VIII.

FICTION-III. MISCELLANEOUS.

Didactic and Philosophical Novels-More's Utopia-Barclay's Argenis -Howell's Dodona's Grove-Harrington's Oceana-Coningsby; or, the New Generation-The Coming Race-Religious Novels-Bunyan -Hannah More-Johnson's Rasselas-Short Stories.

In its ordinary and most legitimate character, prose fiction, like poetry, is the offspring of the imagination, and appeals but indirectly to the higher faculties of reason and the understanding. It pleases the fancy, it inflames the passions, it influences the will, not through any direct teaching force, but through the subtler influences of suggestion and impulse. The novel is a perfect work of art, attracting our admiration by reason of its fidelity to nature; the romance is likewise a work of art, delighting our imagination by its suggestions of the wonderful and the supernatural; both may instruct, but not formally nor explicitly. In such fictions the didactic motive must not be directly expressed, but it must be diffused throughout the entire work, and attain its end by the influence of contact and through the excited sensibilities of the reader. We have seen how Richardson sought in Pamela to convey lessons of virtue and moral rectitude to the young people of his time; how Dean Swift, under the disguise of fiction, censured the vices and laughed at the weaknesses of humanity; how Defoe, through Robinson Crusoe, has filled the minds of thousands of boys with intense longing for the sea and a sea-faring life; how Godwin's Caleb Williams was written for the purpose of illustrating and diffusing the author's views concerning certain social evils and the inefficiency of existing laws; how Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's