dealing with the life of the James boys--not Henry and William,
but Jesse and Frank--which I read ever so long ago; and I would
confer the whole lot of them upon that offspring of mine and I
would say to him:

"Here, my son, is something for you; a rare and precious gift.
Read these volumes openly. Never mind the crude style in which
most of them are written. It can't be any worse than the stilted
and artificial style in which your school reader is written; and,
anyhow, if you are ever going to be a writer, style is a thing
which you laboriously must learn, and then having acquired added
wisdom you will forget part of it and chuck the rest of it out
of the window and acquire a style of your own, which merely is
another way of saying that if you have good taste to start with
you will have what is called style in writing, and if you haven't
that sense of good taste you won't have a style and nothing can
give it to you.

"Read them for the thrills that are in them. Read them, remembering
that if this country had not had a pioneer breed of Buckskin Sams
and Deadwood Dicks we should have had no native school of dime
novelists. Read them for their brisk and stirring movement; for
the spirit of outdoor adventure and life which crowds them; for
their swift but logical processions of sequences; for the phases
of pioneer Americanism they rawly but graphically portray, and
for their moral values. Read them along with your Coopers and
your Ivanhoe and your Mayne Reids. Read them through, and perhaps
some day, if fortune is kinder to you than ever it was to your
father, with a background behind you and a vision before you, you
may be inspired to sit down and write a dime novel of your own