Sir Walter Scott's novels he continued
almost to worship, and was accustomed to read them aloud in his family.
The novels of G.P.R. James, both the early and the later ones, he
insisted were admirable stories, admirably told, and he had high praise
to bestow on the works of Anthony Trollope. "Have you ever read these
novels?" he wrote to me in a letter from England, some time before
Trollope began to be much known in America. "They precisely suit my
taste; solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and
through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had
hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with
all its inhabitants going about their daily business and not suspecting
that they were made a show of. And these books are as English as a
beefsteak. Have they ever been tried in America? It needs an English
residence to make them thoroughly comprehensible; but still I should
think that the human nature in them would give them success anywhere."
I have often been asked if all his moods were sombre, and if he was
never jolly sometimes like other people. Indeed he was; and although the
humorous side of Hawthorne was not easily or often discoverable, yet
have I seen him marvellously moved to fun, and no man laughed more
heartily in his way over a good story.
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