a bookful of Flaxman's attenuated outlines.

At the beginning of the year 1839 he received, through political
interest, an appointment as weigher and gauger in the Boston
Custom-house. Mr. Van Buren then occupied the Presidency, and it
appears that the Democratic party, whose successful candidate he had
been, rather took credit for the patronage it had bestowed upon
literary men. Hawthorne was a Democrat, and apparently a zealous one;
even in later years, after the Whigs had vivified their principles by
the adoption of the Republican platform, and by taking up an honest
attitude on the question of slavery, his political faith never
wavered. His Democratic sympathies were eminently natural, and there
would have been an incongruity in his belonging to the other party. He
was not only by conviction, but personally and by association, a
Democrat. When in later years he found himself in contact with
European civilisation, he appears to have become conscious of a good
deal of latent radicalism in his disposition; he was oppressed with
the burden of antiquity in Europe, and he found himself sighing for
lightness and freshness and facility of change. But these things are
relative to the point of view, and in his own country Hawthorne cast
his lot with the party of conservatism, the party opposed to change
and freshness. The people who found something musty and mouldy in his
literary productions would have regarded this quite as a matter of
course; but we are not obliged to use invidious epithets in describing
his political preferences. The sentiment that attached him to the
Democracy was a subtle and honourable one, and the author of an
attempt to sketch a portrait of him, should be the last to complain of
this adjustment of his sympathies. It falls much more smoothly into
his reader's conception of him than any other would do; and if he had
had the perversity to be a Republican, I am afraid our ingenuity would