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The Memoirs of Nathaniel Hawthorne, that not very amiable genius praises no one of his English hosts (except, indeed, a perhaps too open-handed London one), and that he was not known (any more than Fenimore Cooper, whom years ago I found a rude customer in New York) for a superabundance of good nature. When at Albury, Hawthorne seemed to us superlatively envious: of our old house for having more than seven gables; of its owner for a seemingly affluent independence, as well as authorial fame; even of his friends when driven by him to visit beautiful and hospitable Wotton; and in every word and gesture openly entering his republican and ascetic protest against the aristocratic old country; even to protesting, when we drove by a new weather-boarded cottage,
gpt
Ha, that's the sort of house I prefer to see; it's like one of ours at home. That we did not take to each other is no wonder. This, then, is my answer to the unkindly remarks against me in print of one who has shown manifestly a flash of genius in
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The Scarlet Letter;
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Life Drama, full of sparkling poetic gems, which at once made him popular, apparently with justice enough. I asked him down to Albury, made much of him, praised warmly sundry _morceaux_ of his (which I had marked in my copy), and to my astonishment received the brusque reply,
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O, you like those, do you? I shall alter them in next edition: as I found afterwards he did. He was a common-looking man, with a rough manner, and a squint. As he seemed upset,--though why I could not guess,--I tried in other ways to please him; as, by a ramble in the woods and a drive in the waggonette: but all would not do,--his day came to an end as gloomily as it began. Long after, I stumbled upon the reason. I had then for the first time read Bailey's
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Festus, and found some passages therein very similar to Alexander's; thereafter, other little bits from some other poets (I think Tennyson was one) struck me. Little wonder, then, that I heard no more of Smith,--who clearly had thought himself found out,--and so received my first ignorance of his plagiaristic tendency as if I had known all about it: and years after Aytoun had (as I was told) avenged justice by that cleverest of spasmodic poetries,
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Firmilian, by Percy Jones --a burlesque on Alexander Smith, and a book which the world has too willingly let die. Let no one, however, after all this, fancy that I am unaware of Alexander Smith's true merit. He very neatly fitted into his mosaic word-pictures the titbits he had culled in his commonplace-book out of many poets, and so utilised them. A self-made and self-taught man,
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as he told me,