The morbid emotional self-consciousness of such a journal as David Brainerd's was not likely to find imitation in the active seaport society of Salem. But journals were kept there. Hawthorne began one at the tender age of twelve with the motive of self-improvement in expression, and the practised ease he gained appears in the later note-books, which are cherished illustrations of his grave and graceful style as well as of the artist's propensity to transmute experience into symbol and dream. The Salem boy doubtless did not know that his most eminent elder townsman was an indefatigable diarist, jotting down in careless, awkward language matter not meant for an imaginative version of life. Certainly too the older Salem diarist was not recording his spiritual condition. The Reverend William Bentley, a short and portly clergyman, living an unhampered celibate life, was wont to close days of phenomenal industry by hasty and incisive records of event and comment. After his vigorous walk in the early morning he had stood at a desk all the forenoon working on sermons and correspondence, on manuscript text-books in science or languages, on scripture commentaries, local history, critical reviews of books read, on bi-weekly summaries of home and foreign news to be printed in the newspapers, on parochial records minutely exact as to family occupation and personal circumstance.