Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v1.djvu/337

 considerable merit as a novelist, partictilarly in the matter of comedy, which most of the romancers lacked. Koningsmarke (1823) contains some pleasant burlesquing in its stories of adventures among the Delaware Swedes. Here, as in his later works, Paulding laughed at what he called "Blood-Pudding Literature." He was too facile in lending his pen, as parodist or follower, to whatever fashion happened to be approved to do any very individual work, but The Dutchman's Fireside (1831), probably his masterpiece, deserves to be mentioned with Mrs. Grant's Memoirs of an American Lady (1809), on which it is based, and Cooper's Satanstoe, much its superior, as a worthy record of colonial life along the Hudson. New Jersey and Pennsylvania appear in nothing better than the minor romances of Robert Montgomery Bird (1803-54), The Hawks of Hawk Hollow (1835), Sheppard Lee (1836), and The Adventures of Robin Day (1839), vigorous and sometimes merry tales but not of permanent merit.

To the school of his friend Irving may be assigned the urbane John Pendleton Kennedy (1795-1870). Of excellent Virginia connections, he was born and educated in Baltimore, which, like New York, made rapid progress after the Revolution, first in commerce and then in taste. Having served bloodlessly enough in the War of 1812 and been admitted to the bar, Kennedy lived as merrily as Irving in the chosen circles of his native town. With Peter Hoffman Cruse he issued The Red Book (1818-19), a kind of Baltimore Salmagundi in prose and verse, and after several years devoted to law and politics made a decided success with Swallow Barn (1832), obviously suggested by Bracebridge Hall but none the less notable as a pioneer record of the genial life of a Virginia plantation. Although the story counts for little, Kennedy's easy humour and real skill at description and the indication of character make the book distinguished. His later novels, Horse-Shoe Robinson (1835), in which he dealt with the Revolution in the Carolinas, and Rob of the Bowl (1838), which has its scene laid in colonial Maryland, are nearer Cooper, with the difference that Kennedy depended, as he had done in Swallow Barn, on fact not invention for almost all his action as well as for his details of topography and costimie. Indeed,