so, he would not be likely to appreciate Emerson's intimate friends. A
man like John Brown, always ready to rush upon destruction for an idea,
must have been an inexplicable riddle to him. Yet John Brown was the
only American who could match Hawthorne in ideality--totally different
as they were in other respects.

Twelve years later, while Hawthorne was in Rome, he became acquainted
with a sculptor named Mosier, who gave him a most disparaging account of
Margaret Fuller's marriage to Count D'Ossoli. This informant said that
the D'Ossoli family, though pretending to be noble, actually lived like
peasants; that the count's brother had for some years been a servant to
a gentleman he knew of; that the count himself was an exceedingly
handsome man, but ignorant and clownish; that he could not even speak
Italian; and that Margaret Fuller had become a good deal demoralized in
Rome, and could neither write nor converse with her former brilliancy.
Hawthorne accepted this statement and entered it in his diary with
inferences of his own which are still more unfavorable to Miss Fuller.

We like to believe that he wrote this rather to relieve his own mind
than with the expectation of influencing the minds of others. We can
easily forgive him for it, for in the whole course of his life there is
no other instance of the same kind; but he was most certainly in error
to believe such an imputation on the character of a respectable lady
from the authority of a single witness. C. P. Cranch, the poet and
landscape-painter, says that this Mr. Mosier was the veriest Munchausen,
and nobody in Rome thought of crediting his stories. But Mosier's
statement shows on its face signs of internal weakness. When he says
that Count D'Ossoli in attempting to model a foot placed the big-toe on
the wrong side, he states what is altogether incredible, and discloses
his own splenetic humor. Neither is it more likely that Margaret Fuller