ulterior uses. These were indirect and incidental issues; but from the
consulate qua consulate Hawthorne was radically alien, and when he
quitted it, he carried away with him no taint or trace of it. As he
says in his remarks upon the subject, he soon came to doubt whether it
were actually himself who had been the incumbent of the office at all.

But Providence does not deny manna to man in his extremity, and to my
father it came in the shape of a few English friends, and in
occasional escapes from the office into the outside England where,
after the centuries of separation, he found so much with which he
could still feel profoundly akin. His most constant friendly visitor
was Henry A. Bright, a university man, the son of a wealthy local
merchant, who sent ships to Australia, and was related (as most
agreeable Englishmen are--though there are shining exceptions) to the
aristocratic class. Bright, at this time, could not have been over
thirty years of age; he was intensely English, though his slender
figure and mental vivacity might make him seem near to the
conventional American type. But through him, as through an open
window, Hawthorne was enabled to see far into the very heart of
England. Bright not merely knew England; he was England, and England
at its best, and therefore also at its most insular and prejudiced. It
was unspeakably satisfying and agreeable to encounter a man at once so
uncompromising and so amiable, so wrong-headed (from the American
point of view) and so right-hearted. He was drawn to my father as
iron is drawn to the magnet; on every outward point they fought each
other like the knight errants of old, while agreeing inwardly, beneath
the surface of things, as few friends are able to agree. Each admired
the other's onslaughts and his prowess, and, by way of testifying his
admiration, strove to excel himself in his counter attacks. The debate
was always beginning, and in the nature of things it could never end;