[1] The above portrait of Daniel Webster is taken from a book just issued by the Fowler & Wells Co., New York, entitled, "A Natural System of Elocution and Oratory," founded upon analysis of the Human Constitution. By Thomas A. Hyde and William Hyde. Among other valuable subjects which this book contains is a description and analysis of Webster oratory.
HAWTHORNE'S LAST SKETCH.
BY PHILIP R. AMMIDON.
In the list of contributors to the old "New England Magazine,"—of which this is in a manner the legitimate successor,—among other names afterward famous is that of Nathaniel Hawthorne, then an obscure writer for various periodicals, and the ill-paid author of those juvenile histories that gave Mr. S. G. Goodrich ("Peter Parley") a literary reputation he scarcely earned.
The writer has a copy of this respectable and for a time popular monthly, with which he would be reluctant to part. It contains, for the first time printed, "The White Old Maid," one of the weirdest and most fascinating of the "Twice-Told Tales."
My present object is to invite the notice of readers of the "New England Magazine" of our day to the last completed work from the hand of that man of marvellous genius,
"Which at its topmost speed let fall the pen,
And left the tale half told."
I remember with what concern I once heard a resident of Concord, a man not unknown in the world of letters, speak of certain evils likely to result from "Hawthorne's fall."