relate, though his biographer devotes a good many graceful pages to
them. There is a considerable sameness in the behaviour of small boys,
and it is probable that if we were acquainted with the details of our
author's infantine career we should find it to be made up of the same
pleasures and pains as that of many ingenuous lads for whom fame has
had nothing in keeping.

The absence of precocious symptoms of genius is on the whole more
striking in the lives of men who have distinguished themselves than
their juvenile promise; though it must be added that Mr. Lathrop has
made out, as he was almost in duty bound to do, a very good case in
favour of Hawthorne's having been an interesting child. He was not at
any time what would be called a sociable man, and there is therefore
nothing unexpected in the fact that he was fond of long walks in which
he was not known to have had a companion. "Juvenile literature" was
but scantily known at that time, and the enormous and extraordinary
contribution made by the United States to this department of human
happiness was locked in the bosom of futurity. The young Hawthorne,
therefore, like many of his contemporaries, was constrained to amuse
himself, for want of anything better, with the _Pilgrim's Progress_
and the _Faery Queen_. A boy may have worse company than Bunyan and
Spenser, and it is very probable that in his childish rambles our
author may have had associates of whom there could be no record. When
he was nine years old he met with an accident at school which
threatened for a while to have serious results. He was struck on the
foot by a ball and so severely lamed that he was kept at home for a
long time, and had not completely recovered before his twelfth year.
His school, it is to be supposed, was the common day-school of New
England--the primary factor in that extraordinarily pervasive system
of instruction in the plainer branches of learning, which forms one of