Hart was a lawyer by profession, who also served as a colonel in the National Guard and as a school principal.

[1] It describes the corrupt financial dealings of Miriam, a whaler's wife, whose unproductive market speculations are contrasted with the heroic and productive labors of her husband, fighting nature and dangerous savage peoples to bring home useful raw materials.

[4] Hart's views on Shakespeare were published in The Romance of Yachting (1848), a narrative of his travels to places that give him occasion for musings on a variety of topics.

Hart asserts that Shakespeare had been "dead for one hundred years and utterly forgotten" when in 1709 old playscripts were discovered and published under his name by Nicholas Rowe and Thomas Betterton.

In 1886 it was alleged by George O. Seilhamer in The Times of Philadelphia that Hart had derived his ideas from a lecture by Bacon.

Herman Melville scathingly described Hart's book in his review as "an abortion" which "deserves to be burnt in a fire of asafetida, & by the hand that wrote it.