The local American
histories took his attention pretty often, and he perused a variety of
biography,--"Lives of the Philosophers," "Plutarch's Lives," biographies
of Mohammed, Pitt, Jefferson, Goldsmith, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats,
Baxter, Heber, Sir William Temple, and others. Brewster's "Natural
Magic" and Sir Walter Scott's essay on "Demonology and Witchcraft" are
books that one would naturally expect him to read; and he had already
begun to make acquaintance with the English State Trials, for which he
always had a great liking. "Colquhoun on the Police" would seem not
entirely foreign to one who mentally pursued so many malefactors; but it
is a little surprising that he should have found himself interested in
"Babbage on the Economy of Machinery." He dipped, also, into botany and
zooelogy; turned over several volumes of Bayle's "Critical Dictionary,"
read Mrs. Jameson, and the "London Encyclopaedia of Architecture"; and
was entertained by Dunlap's "History of the Arts of Design in America."
It was from this last that he drew the plot of "The Prophetic Pictures,"
in the "Twice-Told Tales." Some Boston newspapers of the years 1739 to
1783 evidently furnished the material for an article called "Old News,"
reprinted in "The Snow Image." Hawthorne seems never to have talked much
about reading: 'tis imaginable that he was as shy in his choice of books
and his discussion of them, as in his intercourse with men; and there is
no more ground for believing that he did not like books, than that he
cared nothing for men and women.
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