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 be observed in the New World." But there is abundant evidence that Hawthorne was conscious of the realistic method and that he deliberately rejected it. What should a man whose wife "never thought of him as in time" care for the variations of colloquial English in the New World? It is very clear that he sought to winnow out of his fiction everything that can be brought or carried away by the Hours. His literary theory becomes explicit enough in his exquisite chapter on "Lichfield and Uttoxeter" in Our Old Home. He had made a pilgrimage "to indulge a solemn and high emotion" to the scene of Samuel Johnson's penance in the market place of Uttoxeter. Arrived at the spot where his pious errand should have been consummated, he confesses that his first act was to step into a hostelry and order a dinner of bacon and greens, mutton-chops, gooseberry pudding, and ale—"a sufficient meal for six yeomen." On enquiry he finds the Doctor's fellow-townsmen generally unacquainted with the story which had consecrated the place "in the heart of a stranger from three thousand miles over the sea." And his own emotions remain unstirred till he has left the visible Uttoxeter behind him and returned to the Uttoxeter of his inner vision. His comment on this incident may serve us as a commentary on his literary method:

A sensible"A sensible [sic] man had better not let himself be betrayed into these attempts to realize the things