however, was scarcely in the tomb, before his mountain-pile of wealth
began to dwindle." But Nathaniel's family neither helped to undermine
the heap, nor accumulated a rival one. However good the forecast that
his immediate ancestors had made, as to the quickest and broadest road
to wealth, they travelled long in the wake of success without ever
winning it, themselves. The malediction that fell on Justice Hathorne's
head might with some reason have been thought to still hang over his
race, as Hawthorne suggests that its "dreary and unprosperous condition
... for many a long year back" would show. Indeed, the tradition of such
a curse was kept alive in his family, and perhaps it had its share in
developing that sadness and reticence which seem to have belonged to his
father.

It is plain from these circumstances how the idea of "The House of the
Seven Gables" evolved itself from the history of his own family, with
important differences. The person who is cursed, in the romance, uses a
special spite toward a single victim, in order to get hold of a property
which he bequeaths to his own heirs. Thus a double and treble wrong is
done, and the notion of a curse working upon successive generations is
subordinate to the conception of the injury which a man entails to his
own descendants by forcing on them a stately house founded upon a sin.
The parallel of the Hathorne decline in fortune is carried out; but it
must be observed that the peculiar separateness and shyness, which
doubtless came to be in some degree a trait of all the Hathornes, is
transferred in the book from the family of the accursed to that of
Maule, the utterer of the evil prophecy. "As for Matthew Maule's
posterity," says the romancer, "to all appearance they were a quiet,
honest, well-meaning race of people"; but "they were generally
poverty-stricken; always plebeian and obscure; working with unsuccessful
diligence at handicrafts; laboring on the wharves, or following the sea