dinner." Goodrich proposed to him to write a _Universal History_ for
the use of schools, offering him a hundred dollars for his share in
the work. Hawthorne accepted the offer and took a hand--I know not how
large a one--in the job. His biographer has been able to identify a
single phrase as our author's. He is speaking of George IV: "Even when
he was quite a young man this King cared as much about dress as any
young coxcomb. He had a great deal of taste in such matters, and it is
a pity that he was a King, for he might otherwise have made an
excellent tailor." The _Universal History_ had a great vogue and
passed through hundreds of editions; but it does not appear that
Hawthorne ever received more than his hundred dollars. The writer of
these pages vividly remembers making its acquaintance at an early
stage of his education--a very fat, stumpy-looking book, bound in
boards covered with green paper, and having in the text very small
woodcuts, of the most primitive sort. He associates it to this day
with the names of Sesostris and Semiramis whenever he encounters them,
there having been, he supposes, some account of the conquests of these
potentates that would impress itself upon the imagination of a child.
At the end of four months, Hawthorne had received but twenty
dollars--four pounds--for his editorship of the _American Magazine_.

There is something pitiful in this episode, and something really
touching in the sight of a delicate and superior genius obliged to
concern himself with such paltry undertakings. The simple fact was
that for a man attempting at that time in America to live by his pen,
there were no larger openings; and to live at all Hawthorne had, as
the phrase is, to make himself small. This cost him less, moreover,
than it would have cost a more copious and strenuous genius, for his
modesty was evidently extreme, and I doubt whether he had any very
ardent consciousness of rare talent. He went back to Salem, and from