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Show Page 222 found time to make a trip to London to visit the British Museum. Entry into that formidable cultural treasurehouse required, from foreigners, a letter of introduction, and consequently Orson paid a call on the United States Consul in Liverpool the day before New Year's. The man who received him was tall, with a towering forehead and a silver bush of hair - a crony of the outgoing President Pierce. His name was Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is not recorded that Orson knew he was in the presence of America's premier novelist, but Hawthorne, then serving out the last days of his political appointment, left his own record of the meeting in his English Notebooks: "0( ) P( ), the famous Mormonite, called on me a little while ago - a short, black-haired, dark-complexioned man; a shrewd, intelligent, but unrefined countenance, expressively unprepossessing; and uncouth gait and deportment; the aspect of a person in uncomfortable circumstances, and decently behaved, but of a vulgar nature and destitute of early culture...I think I should have taken him for a shoemaker, accustomed to reflect in a rude, strong, evil-disposed way on matters of this world and the next, as he sat on his bench." 28 Unfortunately, there was no discussion between them; Hawthorne referred Orson to the consulate secretary, and Orson's encounter with the author of The Scarlet Letter occasioned nothing more than the offhand description Hawthorne jotted in his journal. While Orson examined the delights of the British Museum, Utah debated the doctrinal merits of his writings. Brigham Young did not mince words any more, whether in public or in private, lighting into his theories over the pulpit. "Orson Pratt puts his feet in it," the Prophet stormed, echoing the disdain of counselor Grant. "He does not know enough...drowns 29 himself in his own philosophy." And to Orson he wrote words of measured warning: "I feel again to say...labour with all your might, rightly |