he was in none more so than in the vagueness of his sense of social
distinctions and his readiness to forget them if a moral or
intellectual sensation were to be gained by it. He liked to fraternise
with plain people, to take them on their own terms, and put himself if
possible into their shoes. His Note-Books, and even his tales, are
full of evidence of this easy and natural feeling about all his
unconventional fellow-mortals--this imaginative interest and
contemplative curiosity--and it sometimes takes the most charming and
graceful forms. Commingled as it is with his own subtlety and
delicacy, his complete exemption from vulgarity, it is one of the
points in his character which his reader comes most to appreciate--that
reader I mean for whom he is not as for some few, a dusky and malarious
genius.

But even if he had had, personally, as many pretensions as he had few,
he must in the nature of things have been more or less of a consenting
democrat, for democracy was the very key-stone of the simple social
structure in which he played his part. The air of his journals and his
tales alike are full of the genuine democratic feeling. This feeling
has by no means passed out of New England life; it still flourishes in
perfection in the great stock of the people, especially in rural
communities; but it is probable that at the present hour a writer of
Hawthorne's general fastidiousness would not express it quite so
artlessly. "A shrewd gentlewoman, who kept a tavern in the town," he
says, in _Chippings with a Chisel_, "was anxious to obtain two or
three gravestones for the deceased members of her family, and to pay
for these solemn commodities by taking the sculptor to board." This
image of a gentlewoman keeping a tavern and looking out for boarders,
seems, from the point of view to which I allude, not at all
incongruous. It will be observed that the lady in question was shrewd;