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Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) by Henry James
page 64 of 179 (35%)
eight pages, but the little figures stand up in the tale as stoutly,
at the least, as if they were propped up on half-a-dozen chapters by a
dryer annalist, and the whole thing has the merit of those cabinet
pictures in which the artist has been able to make his persons look
the size of life. Hawthorne, to say it again, was not in the least a
realist--he was not to my mind enough of one; but there is no genuine
lover of the good city of Boston but will feel grateful to him for his
courage in attempting to recount the "traditions" of Washington
Street, the main thoroughfare of the Puritan capital. The four
_Legends of the Province House_ are certain shadowy stories which he
professes to have gathered in an ancient tavern lurking behind the
modern shop-fronts of this part of the city. The Province House
disappeared some years ago, but while it stood it was pointed to as
the residence of the Royal Governors of Massachusetts before the
Revolution. I have no recollection of it, but it cannot have been,
even from Hawthorne's account of it, which is as pictorial as he
ventures to make it, a very imposing piece of antiquity. The writer's
charming touch, however, throws a rich brown tone over its rather
shallow venerableness; and we are beguiled into believing, for
instance, at the close of _Howe's Masquerade_ (a story of a strange
occurrence at an entertainment given by Sir William Howe, the last of
the Royal Governors, during the siege of Boston by Washington), that
"superstition, among other legends of this mansion, repeats the
wondrous tale that on the anniversary night of Britain's discomfiture
the ghosts of the ancient governors of Massachusetts still glide
through the Province House. And last of all comes a figure shrouded in
a military cloak, tossing his clenched hands into the air and stamping
his iron-shod boots upon the freestone steps, with a semblance of
feverish despair, but without the sound of a foot-tramp." Hawthorne
had, as regards the two earlier centuries of New England life, that
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