village is not an institution to accept of more or less graceful
patronage; it thinks extremely well of itself, and is absolute in its
own regard. Salem is a sea-port, but it is a sea-port deserted and
decayed. It belongs to that rather melancholy group of old
coast-towns, scattered along the great sea-face of New England, and of
which the list is completed by the names of Portsmouth, Plymouth, New
Bedford, Newburyport, Newport--superannuated centres of the traffic
with foreign lands, which have seen their trade carried away from them
by the greater cities. As Hawthorne says, their ventures have gone "to
swell, needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood of commerce at
New York or Boston." Salem, at the beginning of the present century,
played a great part in the Eastern trade; it was the residence of
enterprising shipowners who despatched their vessels to Indian and
Chinese seas. It was a place of large fortunes, many of which have
remained, though the activity that produced them has passed away.
These successful traders constituted what Hawthorne calls "the
aristocratic class." He alludes in one of his slighter sketches (_The
Sister Years_) to the sway of this class and the "moral influence of
wealth" having been more marked in Salem than in any other New England
town. The sway, we may believe, was on the whole gently exercised, and
the moral influence of wealth was not exerted in the cause of
immorality. Hawthorne was probably but imperfectly conscious of an
advantage which familiarity had made stale--the fact that he lived in
the most democratic and most virtuous of modern communities. Of the
virtue it is but civil to suppose that his own family had a liberal
share; but not much of the wealth, apparently, came into their way.
Hawthorne was not born to a patrimony, and his income, later in life,
never exceeded very modest proportions.

Of his childish years there appears to be nothing very definite to