called Manning's Folly, and is now said to be used as a meeting-house.
His uncle sent Hawthorne to Bowdoin College, where he graduated in
1825. A correspondent of the Boston _Daily Advertiser_, writing from
Bowdoin at the late commencement, says that he had recently found "in
an old drawer" some papers which proved to be the manuscript "parts"
of the students at the Junior exhibition of 1824; among them was
Hawthorne's "De Patribus Conscriptis Romanorum". "It is quite brief,"
writes the correspondent, "but is really curious as perhaps the only
college exercise in existence of the great tragic writer of our day
(has there been a greater since Shakespeare?). The last sentence is as
follows (note the words which I put in italics): 'Augustus equidem
antiquam magnificentiam patribus reddidit, _sed fulgor tantum fuit
sine fervore_. Nunquam in republica senatoribus potestas recuperata,
postremum species etiam amissa est.' On the same occasion Longfellow had
the salutatory oration in Latin--'Oratio Latina; Anglici Poetae.'"

Hawthorne has given us a charming glimpse of himself as a college boy
in the letter to his fellow-student, Horatio Bridge, of the Navy,
whose _Journal of an African Cruiser_ he afterwards edited. "I know
not whence your faith came; but while we were lads together at a
country college, gathering blueberries, in study-hours, under those
tall academic pines; or watching the great logs as they tumbled along
the current of the Androscoggin; or shooting pigeons and gray
squirrels in the woods; or bat-fowling in the summer twilight; or
catching trouts in that shadowy little stream which, I suppose, is
still wandering riverward through the forest--though you and I will
never cast a line in it again--two idle lads, in short (as we need not
fear to acknowledge now), doing a hundred things that the faculty
never heard of, or else it had been the worse for us,--still it was
your prognostic of your friend's destiny that he was to be a writer of