Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v1.djvu/336

310 amuck into raving melodrama. For all his very unusual originality and force Neal has ceased to be read, the victim of a bad education and uncritical times. Equally unread, as novelists, are two other writers famous in their day, Catherine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867) and Lydia Maria Child (1802-80), who, through long and busily useful years, touched fiction here and there, both beginning with historical romances in the early days of The Spy's fame and later drifting to more solid shores with the tide of realism. Less gifted than Neal, both had greater charm. Mrs. Child is remembered for her devoted opposition to slavery, but Miss Sedgwick was the more important novelist. Redwood (1824), Hope Leslie (1827), and The Linwoods (1835), her best and most popular stories, exhibit almost every convention of the fiction of her day.

One novelist of New England before Hawthorne, however, still has a wide, healthy public. Daniel Pierce Thompson (1795-1868) knew the Vermont frontier as Cooper knew that of New York. After many struggles with the bitterest poverty he got to Middlebury College, studied law, became a prominent official of his native state, and somewhat accidentally took to fiction. Of his half-dozen novels, which all possess a good share of honest realism, Locke Amsden (1847) gives perhaps the most truthful record of frontier life, but The Green Mountain Boys (1840) is the classic of Vermont. It is concerned with the struggles of the Vermonters for independence first from New York and second from Great Britain; its hero is the famous Ethan Allen. Thompson had none of Cooper's poetry and was little concerned with the magic of nature. He took over most of the tricks of the older novelists, their stock types and sentiments. But he made little effort to preach, he could tell a straight story plainly and rapidly, and he touched action with rhetoric in just the proportion needed to sell fifty editions of the book by 1860 and to make it in the twentieth century a standard book for boys which is by far the most popular romance of the immediate school of Cooper.

The Middle States had no secondary novelist who has survived so sturdily as Thompson. Charles Fenno Hoffman is remembered for his lyrics, not for Greyslaer (1840). James Kirke Paulding, though nearer Irving than Cooper, had