" And he adds: "For my part, I can hardly regret that Sir Walter
Scott had lost his consciousness of outward things before his works went
out of vogue. It was good that he should forget his fame, rather than
that fame should first have forgotten him. Were he still a writer, and
as brilliant a one as ever, he could no longer maintain anything like
the same position in literature. The world, nowadays, requires a more
earnest purpose, a deeper moral, and a closer and homelier truth than he
was qualified to supply it with. Yet who can be to the present
generation even what Scott has been to the past?" Now, in "Fanshawe"
there is something that reminds one of Sir Walter; but the very
resemblance makes the essential unlikeness more apparent.
The scene of the tale is laid at Harley College, "in an ancient, though
not very populous settlement in a retired corner of one of the New
England States." This, no doubt, is a reproduction of Bowdoin. Mr.
Longfellow tells me that the descriptions of the seminary and of the
country around it strongly suggest the Brunswick College. The President
of Harley is a Dr. Melmoth, an amiable and simple old delver in
learning, in a general way recalling Dominie Sampson, whose vigorous
spouse rules him somewhat severely: their little bickerings supply a
strain of farce indigenous to Scott's fictions, but quite unlike
anything in Hawthorne's later work. A young lady, named Ellen Langton,
daughter of an old friend of Dr. Melmoth's, is sent to Harley, to stay
under his guardianship.
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