chanced to need these characters for the "Seven Gables," they revived
and took shape with something of the historic impress still upon them.
That their very names should have been reproduced finds explanation in
the statement once made by Hawthorne to a friend, that the most
vexatious detail of romance-writing, to him, was the finding of suitable
names for the _dramatis personae._ Balzac used to look long among
the shop-signs of Paris for the precise name needed by a preconceived
character, and the absolute invention of such titles is doubtless very
rare; few fictionists are gifted with Dickens's fertility in the
discovering of names bearing the most forcible and occult relations to
the fleshless owners of them. And it is interesting to find that
Hawthorne--somewhat as Scott drew from the local repertory of his
countrymen's nomenclature--found many of his surnames among those of the
settlers of New England. Hooper, Prynne, Felton, Dolliver, Hunnewell,
and others belong specially to these and to their descendants. Roger
Chillingworth, by the by, recalls the celebrated English divine and
controversialist, William; and Bishop Miles Coverdale's name has been
transferred, in "Blithedale," from the reign of Edward VI. to the
experimental era of Brook Farm.

It has been urged as a singular deficiency of Hawthorne's, that he could
not glorify the moral strength and the sweeter qualities of the Puritans
and of their lives. But there was nothing in the direction of his genius
that called him to this. As well urge against him that he did not write
philanthropic pamphlets, or give himself to the inditing of biographies
of benevolent men, or compose fictions on the plan of Sir Charles
Grandison, devoted to the illumination of praiseworthy characters. It is
the same criticism which condemns Dickens for ridiculing certain
preachers, and neglecting to provide the antidote in form of a model
apostle, contrasted in the same book. This is the criticism which would