But what classics they were--then! In the thick of them had appeared a
newspaper story that struggled through and was printed in book form. Old
friends have told me how they waited at the country post-offices to
get a copy, delayed for weeks. It was a scandal to read it in some
localities. It was fiercely attacked as an outrageous exaggeration
produced by temporary excitement and hostile feeling, or praised as a
new gospel. It has been translated into every tongue having a printing
press, and has sold by millions of copies. It was "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
It was not a classic, but what a vigorous immortal mongrel of human
sentiment it was! What a row was kicked up over Miss Braddon's
"Octoroon," and what an impossible yellowback it was! The toughest piece
of fiction I met with as a boy was "Sanford and Merton," and I've been
aching to say so for four pages. If this world were full of Sanfords
and Mertons, then give me Jupiter or some other comfortable planet at a
secure sanitary distance removed.

I can't even remember the writers who were grammatically and
rhetorically perfect forty years ago, and also very dull with it all.
Is there a bookshelf that holds "Leni Leoti, or The Flower of the
Prairies?" There are "Jane Eyre," "Lady Audley's Secret," and "John
Halifax, Gentleman," which will go with many and are all well worth the
reading, too. Are Mrs. Eliza A. Dupuy, Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth,
Mrs. Caroline Lee Hentz and Augusta J. Evans dead? Their novels still
live--look at the book stores. "Linda, or the Young Pilot of the Belle
Creole," "India, the Pearl of Pearl River," "The Planter's Northern
Bride," "St. Elmo"--they were fiction for you! A boy old enough to have
a first sweetheart could swallow them by the mile.

You remember, when we were boys, the circus acrobats always--always,
remember--rubbed young children with snake-oil and walloped them with a