hipmaster, in each generation, retiring from the
quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the
hereditary place before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the
gale which had blustered against his sire and grandsire. The boy also,
in due time, passed from the forecastle to the cabin, spent a
tempestuous manhood, and returned from his world-wanderings to grow
old and die and mingle his dust with the natal earth." Our author's
grandfather, Daniel Hathorne, is mentioned by Mr. Lathrop, his
biographer and son-in-law, as a hardy privateer during the war of
Independence. His father, from whom he was named, was also a
shipmaster, and he died in foreign lands, in the exercise of his
profession. He was carried off by a fever, at Surinam, in 1808. He
left three children, of whom Nathaniel was the only boy. The boy's
mother, who had been a Miss Manning, came of a New England stock
almost as long-established as that of her husband; she is described by
our author's biographer as a woman of remarkable beauty, and by an
authority whom he quotes, as being "a minute observer of religious
festivals," of "feasts, fasts, new-moons, and Sabbaths." Of feasts the
poor lady in her Puritanic home can have had but a very limited number
to celebrate; but of new-moons, she may be supposed to have enjoyed
the usual, and of Sabbaths even more than the usual, proportion.

In quiet provincial Salem, Nathaniel Hawthorne passed the greater part
of his boyhood, as well as many years of his later life. Mr. Lathrop
has much to say about the ancient picturesqueness of the place, and
about the mystic influences it would project upon such a mind and
character as Hawthorne's. These things are always relative, and in
appreciating them everything depends upon the point of view. Mr.
Lathrop writes for American readers, who in such a matter as this are
very easy to please. Americans have as a general thing a hungry
passion for the picturesque, and they are so fond of local colour that
they contrive to perceive it in localities in which the amateurs of
other countries would detect only the most neutral tints. History, as
yet, has left in the United States but so thin and impalpable a
deposit that we very soon touch the hard substratum of nature; and
nature herself, in the western world, has the peculiarity of seeming
rather crude and immature. The very air looks new and young; the light
of the sun seems fresh and innocent, as if it knew as yet