work savours thoroughly of the local soil--it is redolent of the
social system in which he had his being.

This could hardly fail to be the case, when the man himself was so
deeply rooted in the soil. Hawthorne sprang from the primitive New
England stock; he had a very definite and conspicuous pedigree. He was
born at Salem, Massachusetts, on the 4th of July, 1804, and his
birthday was the great American festival, the anniversary of the
Declaration of national Independence.[1] Hawthorne was in his
disposition an unqualified and unflinching American; he found occasion
to give us the measure of the fact during the seven years that he
spent in Europe toward the close of his life; and this was no more
than proper on the part of a man who had enjoyed the honour of coming
into the world on the day on which of all the days in the year the
great Republic enjoys her acutest fit of self-consciousness. Moreover,
a person who has been ushered into life by the ringing of bells and
the booming of cannon (unless indeed he be frightened straight out of
it again by the uproar of his awakening) receives by this very fact an
injunction to do something great, something that will justify such
striking natal accompaniments. Hawthorne was by race of the clearest
Puritan strain. His earliest American ancestors (who wrote the name
"Hathorne"--the shape in which it was transmitted to Nathaniel, who
inserted the _w_,) was the younger son of a Wiltshire family, whose
residence, according to a note of our author's in 1837, was
"Wigcastle, Wigton." Hawthorne, in the note in question, mentions the
gentleman who was at that time the head of the family; but it does not
appear that he at any period renewed acquaintance with his English
kinsfolk. Major William Hathorne came out to Massachusetts in the
early years of the Puritan settlement; in 1635 or 1636, according to
the note to which I have just alluded; in 1630 according to