SOURCE: “Hawthorne's Review of Evangeline,” in The New England Quarterly, Vol. XXIII, No. 2, June, 1950, pp. 232-35.

In the following essay, Hoeltje presents Nathaniel Hawthorne's review of Longfellow's Evangeline.

When the Whigs of Salem were in the midst of their conspiracy to oust Nathaniel Hawthorne from the surveyorship of the Port of Salem, one of their charges was that he had taken an active part in Democratic politics by writing political articles for the Salem Advertiser, a local Democratic organ. In his defense, a letter written to his friend, George S. Hillard,¹ and published at Hillard's instance in the Whig Boston Advertiser, Hawthorne made perhaps his sole public reference to his unsigned review of Longfellow's Evangeline. Even in this statement, however, possibly out of deference to Longfellow, he did not identify the book reviewed.² But in an earlier letter to Hillard he had been more explicit: “My contributions to...