'local names and peculiarities make a fictitious story look so much better in the face.' In fact, from his boyish habits. he was but half satisfied with the most beautiful scenery when he could not connect it with same local legend, and when I was forced sometimes to confess with the knifegrinder, 'Story! God bless you! I have none to tell, sir' - he would laugh and say, 'then let us make one nothing so easy as to make a tradition.'

WROTE BEST EARLY IN THE MORNING

EDINBURGH, February 10, 1826 The half hour between waking and rising has all my life proved propitious to any task which was exercising my invention. When I get over any knotty difficulty in a story, or have had in former times to fill up a passage in a poem, it was always when I first opened my eyes that the desired ideas thronged upon me. This is so much the case that I am in the habit of relying upon it, and saying to myself, when I am at a loss, "Never mind, we shall have it at seven o'clock to-morrow morning." If I have forgot a circumstance, or a name, or a copy of verses, it is the same thing. I think the first hour of the morning is also favourable to the bodily strength. Among other feats, when I was a young man, I was able at times to lift a smith's anvil with one hand, by what is called the horn, or projecting piece of iron on which things are beaten to turn them around. But I could only do this before

breakfast, and shortly after rising. It required my full strength, undiminished by the least exertion, and those who choose to try it will find the feat no easy one. This morning I had some good ideas respecting "Woodstock," which will make the story better. The devil of a difficulty is, that one puzzles the skein in order to excite curiosity, and then cannot disentangle it for the satisfaction of the prying fiend they have raised.

[How Scott employed his materials in the construction of a romance is told in his introduction to the "Fortunes of Nigel."]

MOODS IN COMPOSITION

June 4, 1826 I wrote a good task yesterday, and to-day a great one, scarce stirring from the desk the whole day, except a few minutes when Lady Rae called. I was glad to see my wife's old friend, with whom in early life we had so many pleasant meetings. I am not sure it is right to work so hard; but a man must take himself, as well as other people, when he is in the humour. A man will do twice as much at one time and in half the time, and twice as well as he will be able to do at another. People are always crying out about method, and in some respects it is good, and shows to great advantage among men of business, but I doubt if men of method, who can lay aside or take up the pen just at the hour appointed, will ever be better than poor creatures. Lady L[ouise] S[tuart]

used to tell me of Mr. Hoole, the translator of "Tasso" and "Ariosto," and in that capacity a noble transmuter of gold into lead, that he was a clerk in the India House, with long ruffles and a snuff-coloured suit of clothes, who occasionally visited her father [John, Earl of Bute]. She sometimes conversed with him, and was amused to find that he did exactly so many couplets day by day, neither more or less; and habit had made it light to him, however heavy it might seem to the reader.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

[Hawthorne is the one supreme romancer that America has given to the world. Himself of Puritan blood he depicted with weird power and profound insight the conflict between Puritan passion and Puritan conscience. Underlying his faculty as a writer was strong common sense — matured in the school of adversity. Had fortune permitted, he would have been a recluse to the end of his days. Poverty obliged him to earn his bread in the Custom Houses of Boston and Salem, in the American Consulate at Liverpool. This compulsory taking part in every-day life did him good. It enlarged his knowledge of human nature: it gave a foil to the sombre broodings of his imagination.

In 1876 his son-in-law, the late George P. Lathrop, wrote "A Study of Hawthorne," which has furnished two letters here transcribed. "Hawthorne and his Wife," by Julian Hawthorne, their son, has provided the other letters here presented, thanks to the courtesy of the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston.

Some charming pages of autobiography, flecked here and there with an inevitable touch of romance, are given by Hawthorne in his prefaces to "Twice-told Tales, and "Mosses from an Old Manse." The introductory chapter of "The Scarlet Letter" describes the Salem Custom House in a vein of unwonted humour. This by-play but heightens the effect of a tragedy unfolded with a skill nothing less than magical. ED.]

[In 1853 Hawthorne gave Richard H. Stoddard a brief autobiographical sketch for the National Review:]

AS A BOY

I WAS born in the town of Salem, Massachusetts [July 4, 1804] in a house built by my grandfather, who was a maritime personage.

The old household estate was in another part of the town, and had descended in the family ever since the settlement of the country; but this old man of the sea exchanged it for a lot of land situated near the wharves, and convenient to his business, where he built the house (which is still standing), and laid out a garden, where I rolled on a grass-plot under an apple-tree and picked abundant currants. This grandfather (about whom there is a ballad in Griswold's "Curiosities of American Literature") died long before I was born. One of the peculiarities of my boyhood was a grievous disinclination to go to school, and (Providence favouring me in this natural repugnance) I never did go half as much as other boys, partly owing to delicate health (which I made the most of for the purpose), and partly because, much of the time, there were no schools within reach.

When I was eight or nine years old, my mother, with her three children, took up her residence on the banks of the Sebago Lake, in Maine, where the family owned a large tract of land; and here I ran quite wild, and would, I doubt not, have willingly run wild till this time, fishing all day long, or shooting with an old fowling-piece; but reading a good deal, too, on the rainy days, especially in Shakspeare and "The Pilgrim's Progress," and any poetry or light books within my reach. Those were delightful days; for that part of the country was wild then, with only scattered clearings, and