Page:The American Novel - Carl Van Doren.djvu/83

Rh of criticism. Famous chiefly because it prophesied disunion and civil war, the book deserves note also for its classical restraint, its pride, its intense, conscious Virginianism. Distinction of another sort belongs to the Rev. William Ware of Massachusetts, whose Zenobia (1837), Aurelian (1838), and Julian (1841), though strongly biased in favor of the creed Ware preached, and often diffuse and monotonous, have still force and charm enough to be read even in the present day by that considerable share of the population to whom books dealing with the origins of Christianity are equally duty and delight. And there is another distinction still in Kaloolah (1849), by William Starbuck Mayo of New York, a romance which contains a strange mixture of satire and romance in its account of an African Utopia visited by the Yankee hero Jonathan Romer.

Besides the novelists who can here be characterized or even named there were, or had been, by 1851 many others whom it would avail little to catalogue: authors for children, authors preaching causes, authors celebrating fashionable or Bohemian life in New York; writers of domestic stories with obvious morals, writers of adventure stories with shudderingly sensational plots. Longfellow lamented the success which attended the flashy labors of Joseph Holt Ingraham. E. Z. C. Judson ("Ned Buntline") and Emerson Bennett began their energetic, sub-literary careers. As the century advanced there was undoubtedly an increase in the amount of trivial fiction produced. The rise of the great Victorian novelists in England was not paralleled in America. Their works in the absence of any copyright could be sold by American publishers more