have seen, that he constantly and closely scanned his distinguished
friend the President's character with his impartial and searching eye
for human character, whatsoever its relations to himself. I believe if
he had ever found that the original nucleus of honor and of a certain
candor which had charmed him in Pierce was gone, he would, provided it
seemed his duty, have rejected the friendship. As it was, he saw his old
friend and comrade undergoing changes which he himself thought
hazardous, saw him criticised in a post where no one ever escaped the
severest criticism, and beheld him return to private life amid
unpopularity, founded, as he thought, upon misinterpretation of what was
perhaps error, but not dishonesty. Meanwhile he felt that the old
"Frank," his brother through Alma Mater, dwelt still within the person
of the public man; and though to claim that brotherhood exposed
Hawthorne, under the circumstances, to cruel and vulgar insinuations, he
saw that duty led him to the side of his friend, not to that of the
harsh multitude.

Perhaps his very earliest contribution to light literature was an
apocryphal article which he is said to have written when about eighteen
or nineteen. Just then there came into notice a voracious insect, gifted
with peculiar powers against pear-trees. Knowing that his uncle was
especially concerned in fruit culture, Hawthorne wrote, and sent from
college to a Boston paper, a careful description of the new destroyer,
his habits, and the proper mode of combating him, all drawn from his own
imagination. It was printed, so the tale runs; and a package of the
papers containing it arrived in Salem just as the author reached there
for a brief vacation. Mr. Manning is said to have accepted in good faith
the knowledge which the article supplied, but Hawthorne's amusement was
not unmixed with consternation at the success of his first essay.