A Virtuoso's Collection

"A Virtuoso's Collection" is the final short story in Mosses from an Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It was first published in Boston Miscellany of Literature and Fashion, I (May 1842), 193-200. The story references a number of historical and mythical figures, items, beasts, books, etc. as part of a museum collection. Some scholars regard the real-life museum of the East India Marine Society in Salem, Massachusetts, as a model for Hawthorne's fictional museum.^[1] The narrator is led through the collection by the virtuoso himself who turns out to be the Wandering Jew.

The collection

• Opportunity, by the ancient sculptor Lysippus
• The wolf that devoured Little Red Riding Hood
• The she-wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus
• Edmund Spenser's 'milk-white lamb' which Una led in The Faerie Queene
• Alexander the Great's Bucephalus
• Don Quixote's horse Rosinante
• The donkey from William Wordsworth's Peter Bell: A Tale
• The donkey from Book of Numbers chapter 22 that was beaten by Balaam
• Argus, Ulysses' dog
• Cerberus
• The fox from Aesop's fable The Fox Who Lost Its Tail
• Dr. Samuel Johnson's cat Hodge
• The cat who saved Muhammad from a snake, or Muezza, the Prophet's pet. Perhaps both cats are in the collection.
• Thomas Gray's inspiration for the poem "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes". The cat, Selima, belonged to Horace Walpole
• Sir Walter Scott's cat Hinse
• Puss in Boots
• Bast, the Egyptian sun and war goddess, in her cat form
• George Gordon Byron's pet bear
• The Erymanthean Boar
• St. George's Dragon. See Saint George and the Dragon
• Python
• The serpent which tempted Eve
• The horn's of the stag poached by Shakespeare^[2]
• The shell of the tortoise that supposedly killed Aeschylus
• Apis, an Egyptian bull-deity
• "The cow with the crumpled horn" from the nursery rhyme "This Is The House That Jack Built"
• The cow that jumped over the moon from the nursery rhyme "Hey Diddle Diddle"
• A griffin
• The dove that brought the olive branch to Noah to signify that the flood was receding
• Grip, the raven that belonged to Barnaby Rudge and later inspired Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven"
• The raven in which the soul of George I of Great Britain revisited his love, Melusine von der Schulenburg, Duchess of Kendal after his death
• Minerva's owl
• The vulture (or eagle) that daily ate Prometheus's liver
• The sacred ibis of Egypt
• One of the Stymphalian birds shot by Hercules. See Labours of Hercules
• Percy Bysshe Shelley's skylark from "To a Skylark"
• William Cullen Bryant's water-fowl from "To a Waterfowl"
• A pigeon, preserved by Nathaniel Parker Willis, from the belfry of Old South Church in Boston
• The albatross from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
• A domestic goose from the temple of Juno on the Capitoline Hill. Livy claimed these geese saved Rome from the Gauls around 390 BC.
• Robinson Crusoe's parrot
• A live phoenix
• A footless bird of paradise or Huma bird
• The peacock that once contained the soul of Pythagoras

References

1. Charles E. Goodspeed (1946), Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Museum of the Salem East India Marine Society, Salem, Mass.: Peabody Museum (fulltext via HathiTrust)
2. http://shakespeare.palomar.edu/rowe.htm

Further reading

• Nathaniel Hawthorne (May 1842). "A Virtuoso's Collection". Boston Miscellany 1.

Bibliography

• Goluboff, Benjamin (1995). "'A Virtuoso's Collection': Hawthorne, History, and the Wandering Jew". Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 1995 Spring; 21 (1): 14-25. ISSN 0890-4197.
• McMurray, Price (2002). "'I Would Write on the Lintels of the Door-Post, Whim': History and Idealism in A Virtuoso's Collection. Conference of College Teachers of English Studies 2002 September; 67: 32-42. ISSN 0092-8151.