I don't know if people remember this thread of the ongoing
conversation about Twain and Trollope, but I would like to thank
Tracy Wuster for reporting that Hawthorne article in the Sep 1879
North American Review.

Great article about a personal favorite, but Trollope brought up a
story Hawthorne wrote called "P.'s Correspondence." To quote Trollope:

"P. is a madman, who, in writing to his friend in Boston from his
madhouse chamber, imagines himself to have met in London Byron,
Burns, Scott, and a score of other literary worthies, still alive as
he supposes, but a score of other literary worthies, still alive as
he supposes, but who by the stress of years have been changed in al
their peculiarities, as men are changed when they live long. Byron
becomes very religious, and professes excessive high-church
tendencies...Hawthorne adds to this the joke that all his own
American literary contemporaries,--men whom he knew to be alive, and
with whom he probably was intimate,--are, alas! dead and gone. The
madman weeps over Bryant, Whittier, and Longfellow, while he has been
associating with Keats, Canning, and John Kemble" (p. 219).

Now a lot has been made of Twain's embarrassing contribution to the
John Greenleaf Whittier dinner on 17 December 1877.  For a recent
recap please see Ron Powers's Mark Twain: A Life, pages 409-413.
Anyway, there Twain recalls a miner who met men claiming to be
Longfellow, Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Homes. "Emerson was seedy,
Holmes a three hundred-pound blubberball, Longfellow built like a
prizefighter with cropped hair and a pulverized nose" (p. 410).

Is it too much a stretch to see a relationship, perhaps just an
inspiration in Hawthorne's work for Twain's speech? Hawthorne wrote
the piece in 1845; it appeared in Mosses from an Old Manse in 1846.
If Twain's anecdote was an embarrassment, is it possible the
luminaries forgot their old comrade's piece, and that Trollope's
reminder came two years too late? Has anyone ever put these two
things together?

Thanks!

Alex Effgen
Boston University