Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v1.djvu/338

312 he founded the career of Horse-Shoe Robinson upon that of an actual partisan with such care that the man is said later to have approved the record as authentic. Decidedly Kennedy's gift was for enriching actual events with a finer grace and culture than many of the rival romancers could command. His style is dear, his methods always simple and rational. Of his miscellaneous writings The Annals of Quodlibet (1840) is tolerable satire, and the Memoirs of the Life of William Wirt (1849), substantial biography. Kennedy's range of friendship with other authors was wide; he had a full and honourable public career in city, state, and national affairs.

South of the Potomac there were relatively few novelists during Cooper's lifetime. The great tradition of Virginia was sustained by her orators and scholars rather than by her writers of fiction, but Nathaniel Beverley Tucker (1784-1851) was both scholar and novelist. His George Balcombe (1836) Poe thought the best novel by an American; his Partisan Leader (1836), primarily famous because it prophesied disunion, is clearly a notable though little known work. No other American of the time wrote with such classical restraint and pride as Tucker. No book, of any time, surpasses The Partisan Leader for intense, conscious Virginianism. Mention should be made of Dr. William Alexander Caruthers (1800-46), perhaps less for his genial novels, The Cavaliers of Virginia (1835) and The Knights of the Horse-Shoe (1845), than for his widely-known sketch Climbing the Natural Bridge. The lower states best appeared in the pages of their native humorists, who seldom wrote novels. South Carolina produced the writer who, among all the American romancers of the first half century, ranks nearest Cooper for scope and actual achievement.

William Gilmore Simms has been, to a pathetic degree, the victim of attachment to his native state. It was one of his strongest passions. He loved every foot of South Carolina, he honoured its traditions and defended its institutions even when they hurt his own fame. His best work was largely devoted to an heroic account of the Revolution in the Carolinas. But, whether his birth did not admit him to the aristocracy of Charleston, or because of a traditional disrespect for native