William Austin was a Boston lawyer of literary tastes. He saw something of the world in his cruises (1799–1800) on the “Constitution” as chaplain, and of society during his eighteen months at Lincoln’s Inn. An account of his life and works is prefixed to the collective edition, now out of print, edited by his son, John Walker Austin (The Literary Papers of William Austin, Boston, 1890). This also reprints a large part of Col. T. W. Higginson’s “A Precursor of Hawthorne” (Independent, 29th March, 1888. A reference will also be found at pages 64 and 68 of Col. Higginson’s Longfellow). Of his few tales only Peter Rugg has had any currency. Indeed, the significance of Austin’s narrative art is mainly negative. Even Peter Rugg shows wherein what might have been a short story failed of its form. For all its undoubted quality, it is a short story manqué; and in this it is quite typical of its time. If artistic sense is apparent in the cumulation of foreshadowings, crudity of mechanism is equally apparent in the management of each through a different interlocutor. It is artistically right that Rugg should at last be brought home; it is artistically wrong that the conclusion should be so like a moralising summary. A conception much like Hawthorne’s is developed as it were by mere accumulation instead of being focused in a unified progression. (See also pages 10 and 12 of the Introduction.)