lity is
there, the mixture of shabbiness and freshness, the paucity of
ingredients. The end of an old race--this is the situation that
Hawthorne has depicted, and he has been admirably inspired in the
choice of the figures in whom he seeks to interest us. They are all
figures rather than characters--they are all pictures rather than
persons. But if their reality is light and vague, it is sufficient,
and it is in harmony with the low relief and dimness of outline of the
objects that surround them. They are all types, to the author's mind,
of something general, of something that is bound up with the history,
at large, of families and individuals, and each of them is the centre
of a cluster of those ingenious and meditative musings, rather
melancholy, as a general thing, than joyous, which melt into the
current and texture of the story and give it a kind of moral richness.
A grotesque old spinster, simple, childish, penniless, very humble at
heart, but rigidly conscious of her pedigree; an amiable bachelor, of
an epicurean temperament and an enfeebled intellect, who has passed
twenty years of his life in penal confinement for a crime of which he
was unjustly pronounced guilty; a sweet-natured and bright-faced young
girl from the country, a poor relation of these two ancient
decrepitudes, with whose moral mustiness her modern freshness and
soundness are contrasted; a young man still more modern, holding the
latest opinions, who has sought his fortune up and down the world,
and, though he has not found it, takes a genial and enthusiastic view
of the future: these, with two or three remarkable accessory figures,
are the persons concerned in the little drama. The drama is a small
one, but as Hawthorne does not put it before us for its own
superficial sake, for the dry facts of the case, but for something in
it which he holds to be symbolic and of large application, something
that points a moral and that it behoves us to remember, the scenes in
the rusty wooden house whose gables give its name to the story, have
something of the dignity both of history and of tragedy. Miss
Hephzibah Pyncheon, dragging out a disappointed life in her paternal
dwelling, finds herself obliged in her old age to open a little shop
for the sale of penny toys and gingerbread. This is the central
incident of the tale, and, as Hawthorne relates it, it is an incident
of the most impressive magnitude and most touching interest. Her
dishonoured and vague-mi