who have no dark and bitter past to remember. Then, the gradual
corrosion of heart of Dimmesdale, the faithless priest, under the
insidious care of the husband, (whose relationship to Hester is
a secret known only to themselves,) is appalling; and his final
confession and expiation are merely a relief, not a reconciliation.
We are by no means satisfied that passions and tragedies like these
are the legitimate subjects for fiction: we are satisfied that
novels such as 'Adam Blair,' and plays such as 'The Stranger,' maybe
justly charged with attracting more persons than they warn by their
excitement. But if Sin and Sorrow in their most fearful forms are to
be presented in any work of art, they have rarely been treated with
a loftier severity, purity, and sympathy than in Mr. Hawthorne's
'Scarlet Letter.' The touch of the fantastic befitting a period of
society in which ignorant and excitable human creatures conceived each
other and themselves to be under the direct 'rule and governance' of
the Wicked One, is most skillfully administered. The supernatural here
never becomes grossly palpable:--the thrill is all the deeper for its
action being indefinite, and its source vague and distant."

[Footnote 2: The Scarlet Letter: a Romance. By Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Boston: Ticknor & Co.]

* * * * *

The Emperor Nicholas has just published an ordonnance, which regulates
the pensions to which Russian and foreign actors at the imperial
theaters at St. Petersburgh shall be entitled. This ordonnance divides
the actors (national as well as foreign) into four classes. The first
class obtains, after twenty years' service, pensions averaging from
300 to 1140 silver rubles. The others, after fifteen years' service,