The House of Souls
essentia of all county families? It may be said that there are exceptions to these canons, but they will be found of little weight. Dickens, it is true, has strange fantasies: but these have been forgiven him for the sake of his zeal for reform in Church and State. Hawthorne has kindled a light not altogether of this world that shines on his pages; but how true the moral of the "Scarlet Letter"! How clearly we may deduce from its chapters the conclusion that no blessing can attend the unhallowed amours of an Independent minister! Let us always remember that Longfellow, besides translating the works of Dante and of other foreign Romanists, gave us the "Psalm of Life."
These, then, are the conditions under which imagination works in our happy country; and for these conditions I say that we have to thank our sturdy Puritan ancestors. No doubt the popular mind has, as I have noted, been captured by the tangible and contemporary achievements of the stout Commonwealth's men. It has remembered that in the seventeenth century England stood at the parting of the ways: the flunkey's motto—"Honour the King"—was being reasserted with renewed force, with much superstitious and absurd nonsense about the "Lord's Anointed." Laud was clearing away the wholesome
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