witch, or of Quaker, although an atmosphere of sorcery seems to pervade the air, but one of that strict and rigid morality peculiar to the Puritans, who loved to visit with legal penalties such sins as are now kept in check by public opinion. Accordingly, our first sight of Hester, is exposed upon a scaffold, wearing upon her breast a scarlet A, glittering with gold embroidery, and carrying in her arms a female infant. She had been sent, without her husband, under the protection of some of the elders of the colony, and the punishment was not merely caused by the birth of this child of shame, but by her resolute concealment of the partner of her guilt. Step by step, the reader becomes acquainted with the secret. The participator of her frailty was a young and eloquent preacher, famed not only for learning and talent, but for severe sanctity. The husband arrives under a false character, recognised only by the erring wife, before whom, cruel, vindictive, hating and hateful, he appears as a visible conscience; and the sufferings of the proud and fiery Hester, enduring a daily martyrdom of shame and scorn, and of the seducer perishing under the terrible remorse of undeserved praise, respect, and honour, are amongst the finest and most original conceptions of tragic narrative. Detestable as the husband is, and with all the passionate truth that Mr. Hawthorne has thrown into the long agony of the seducer, we never, in our pity for the sufferer, lose our abhorrence of the sin.

Scarcely a twelvemonth has passed, and another New England story, "The House with the Seven Gables," has come to redeem the pledge of excellence given by the first.

In this tale, Fate plays almost as great a part as in a Greek Trilogy. Two centuries ago, a certain wicked and powerful Colonel Pyncheon, was seized with a violent desire to possess himself of a certain bit of ground, on which to build the large and picturesque wooden mansion from which the story takes its title. Master Maule, the original possessor, obstinate and poor, refused all offers of money for his land; but being shortly afterwards accused, no one very well knows why, of the fashionable sin of witchcraft, the poor man is tried, condemned, and burnt; the property forfeited and sold; and the rich man's house erected without let or pause. But the shadow of a great crime has passed over the place. A bubbling spring, famous for the purity and freshness of its waters, turns salt and bitter, and the rich man himself-the great, powerful, wicked Colonel Pyncheon -is found dead in his own hall, stricken by some strange, sudden, mysterious death on the very day of his taking possession, and when he had invited half the province to his house-warming. Both proprietors, the poor old wizard, and the wealthy Colonel, leave one child, and during two succeeding centuries these races, always distinct and peculiar, come at long intervals strangely across each other.

Nothing can exceed the skill with which this part of the book is managed. The story is not told; we find it out; we feel that there is a legend; that some strange destiny has hovered over the old house, and hovers there still. The slightness of the means by which this feeling is excited is wonderful. The mixture of the grotesque and the supernatural in Hoffman and the German School, seems coarse and vulgar

blundering in the comparison; even the mighty magician of Udolpho, the Anne Radcliffe whom the French quote with so much unction, was a bungler at her trade, when compared with the vague, dim, vapoury, impalpable ghastliness with which Mr. Hawthorne has contrived to envelope his narrative.

Two hundred years have passed. The Maules have disappeared; and the Pyncheons are reduced by the mysterious death of the last proprietor, to a poor old maid in extreme poverty, with little left but this decaying mansion; a brother whom she is expecting home after a long imprisonment, also a mystery; a Judge, flourishing and prosperous, in whom we at once recognise a true descendant of the wicked Colonel; and a little New England girl, a country cousin, who is the veriest bit of life and light, the brightest beam of sunshine that has ever crossed the Atlantic. Monsieur Eugène Sue had some such inspiration when, in his very happiest moment, he painted Rigolette; but this rose is fresher still. Her name (there is a great deal in names, let Juliet say what she will) is Phoebe. I am not going to tell the story of this book, but I must give one glimpse of Phoebe, although it will very inadequately convey the charm that extends over the whole volume;

make that understood, I must say that the poor old cousin Hepzibah, " Old Maid Pyncheon," as she is called by her townsfolk-(I wonder whether the Americans do actually bestow upon all their single women that expressive designation: one has some right to be curious as to the titles conferred upon one's own order ;)—“ Old Maid Pyncheon” had that very day, for the purpose, as it afterwards appeared,

VOL. II.

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of supporting the liberated prisoner, opened in this aristocratic mansion a little shop.-N.B. I bad once a fancy to set up a shop myself, not quite of the same kind; but there were other sorts of pride besides my own to be consulted, so beyond a jest, more than halfearnest, with a rich neighbour, who proposed himself as a partner, the fancy hardly came to words. Ah, I have a strong fellow-feeling for that poor Hepzibah -a decayed gentlewoman, elderly, ugly, awkward, near-sighted, cross! I have a deep sympathy with Old Maid Pyncheon,' as she appears on the morning of this great trial:

"Forth she steps into the dusky time-darkened passage; a tall figure clad in black silk, with a long and shrunken waist, feeling her way towards the stairs, like a near-sighted person, as in truth she is.

"We must linger a moment on the unfortunate expression of poor Hepzibah's brow. Her scowl-as the world, or such part of it as sometimes caught a transitory glimpse of her at the window, wickedly persisted in calling it—her scowl had done Miss Hepzibah a very ill office in establishing her character as an ill-tempered old maid; nor does it appear improbable that, by often gazing at herself in a dim looking-glass, and perpetually encountering her own frown within its ghostly sphere, she had been led to interpret her expression almost as unjustly as the world did. 'How miserably cross I look,' she must often have whispered to herself; and ultimately have fancied herself so by a sense of inevitable doom. But her heart never frowned. It was naturally tender, sensitive, and full of little tremors and palpitations;

all of which it retained, while her visage was growing perversely stern, and even fierce. Nor had Hepzibah ever any hardihood, except what came from the very warmest nook in her affections.

"All this time, however, we are loitering faintheartedly on the threshold of our story. In very truth, we have a reluctance to disclose what Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon was about to do.

"It has already been observed, that in the basement story of the gable fronting on the street, an unworthy ancestor, nearly a century ago, had fitted up a shop. Ever since the old gentleman retired from trade and fell asleep under his coffin-lid, not only the shop-door, but the inner arrangements had been suffered to remain unchanged, while the dust of ages gathered inch-deep over the shelves and counter, and partly filled an old pair of scales, as if it were of value enough to be weighed. It treasured itself up too in the half-open till, where there still lingered a base sixpence, worth neither more nor less than the hereditary pride that had here been put to shame. Such had been the condition and state of the little shop in old Hepzibah's childhood, when she and her brother used to play at hide-and-seek in its forsaken precincts. Such it had remained until within a few days past.

"But now, though the shop-window was still closely curtained from the public gaze, a remarkable change had taken place in its interior. The rich and heavy festoons of cobweb which it had cost a long ancestral succession of spiders their life's labour to spin and weave, had been carefully brushed away from the ceiling. The counter, shelves, and floor had all been