[94]. lady of Pownall: the wife of Thomas Pownall, a royal governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony. Bernard: Sir Thomas Bernard, another royal governor.
[98]. Steeled knights of the Conquest: persons dressed as cavalrymen in steel armor of 1066, when William the Conqueror became King of England. party-colored Merry Andrew: an old term for a clown dressed in garments having several colors. Falstaff: an important character in several of Shakespeare's plays. He is always represented as fat and ridiculous. Don Quixote: the chief character of the celebrated Spanish satire "Don Quixote" (1605) by Cervantes. Don Quixote is a simple-minded man, whose head has been turned by reading the extravagant romances of chivalry then current, in which knights ride forth to redress wrongs. He feels himself called to such a mission and, armed with various ridiculous makeshifts and accompanied by a humorous squire, Sancho Panza, whose sayings have achieved an immortality nearly equal to his master's doings, he sallies out upon a course of adventures, which caused the world to laugh the dying remnants of false chivalry into its grave. Colonel Joliffe: an imaginary character. whig principles: the people belonging to the patriotic party in the colonies were called Whigs.
[99]. Rev. Mather Byles: an actual person (1706-1788). He was imprisoned in 1777 as a Tory; that is, as an adherent of the king. wig and band: Protestant clergymen of that day wore wigs and a strip of linen, called a band, placed about the neck with the ends hanging down in front.
[102]. regicide judges: in the first part of the seventeenth century the people of England became dissatisfied with their king, Charles I, because of his illegal acts. They revolted, captured the king, put him on trial, and executed him, January 30, 1649. The judges are called regicide, because they tried and condemned a king. The royal party spoke of him as a martyr to the cause.
[110]. When the truth-telling accents, etc.: Hawthorne has tried in this last paragraph to emphasize the contrast between the rather sordid real and the imaginary. He is entirely too successful, because he spoils the effect of the story—something for which Poe strove with such singleness of purpose as to permit of no such ending.
NOTES TO "THE BIRTHMARK"
This story was first published in the March, 1843, number of The Pioneer, a magazine edited by James Russell Lowell, and was republished in "Mosses from an Old Manse" in 1846. It belongs to the "moral philosophic" group of Hawthorne's writings (see Introduction).
Page [112]. natural philosophy: an old term for physics. spiritual affinity: in chemistry certain elements show a tendency to combine with others, so an attraction of one human spirit for another, leading generally to marriage, is often called a spiritual affinity.
[114]. Eve of Powers: Hiram Powers (1805-1873). An American sculptor whose statue of Eve is one of his noted works.
[118]. Pygmalion: in Greek mythology a sculptor who made such a beautiful statue of a woman that he fell in love with it, whereupon in answer to his prayer the goddess Aphrodite gave it life.