him; but this resource also failed him.

At last Bancroft the historian, whom James K. Polk strangely enough had
made secretary of the navy, heard of his situation, and had him
appointed collector of the port at Salem. He was again removed from that
position by President Taylor, and it has been said that his wife
heroically supported him by her skill in drawing and painting until the
"Scarlet Letter" could be finished and money procured from its
publication. The nomination of Franklin Pierce for the presidency was a
piece of good fortune for Hawthorne such as the wildest expectation
could never have imagined; and at length in his fiftieth year, with the
consulate of Liverpool, he finally saw the wolves driven from his door.
This realistic side of his life seems to have escaped the attention of
his biographers.

Yet he may be called fortunate to have lived when he did. It is easy to
say that we should have appreciated Emerson and Hawthorne better than
their cotemporaries appreciated them, but it is one thing to recognize a
genius when we meet him and a very different matter to admire him after
we have been informed that he is a famous man. It is doubtful if writers
in whom the ideality is so strongly marked would be received with favor
at the present time either by editors or the public. The tendency to
materialism would have been too strong for them. Lyceum lectures, on
which Emerson depended chiefly, are not what they were; and either of
them in a magazine would appear in too startling a contrast with the
smooth impersonal writing of to-day. The two cardinal sins of a writer
now are to have a style of his own and ideas of his own.

Complaint is frequently made that we have no great men like those of the
past; but such grand individualities as Hawthorne and Webster, or even