THE AMERICAN NOVKL

who had now for the most part lost the high courtesy of
Cooper's and were displayed in the bitter spirit which
prompted that Western saying that the only good Indian is
a dead Indian, Among the actual heroes of this adventurous
world the men who achieved a primacy like that of Daniel
Boone among the older order of scouts were Kit Carson, the
famous scout, and Buffalo Bill (William K Cody), who was
first put on the stage (1872) by the intrepid Ned Buntline
and later capitalized his own personality and reputation in
the circus which exhibited its microcosm of the Wild West
round the world. The dime novels which suggested such an
enterprise, and in turn were furthered by it, were cheap, con-
ventional, hasty—Albert W. Aikcn long averaged one a week,
and Prentiss Ingraham produced in all over six hundred—but
they were exciting, full of incident and innocence, and scrap*
ulously devoted to the popular doctrines of poetic justice,
What they lacked was all distinction except that of a rough
abundance of invention, and Frank Morris could later grieve
that the epic days of Western settlement found only such
tawdry Homers.

One successor of Cooper upheld for a time the dignity of
the old-fashioned romance* John Estcn Cooke {* 830-86),
born in the Shenandoah Valley and brought up in Richmond,
cherished a passion as intense as Simms's for his native state
and deliberately set out to celebrate its past and its beauty.
Leather Stocking and Silk (1854) and The Last of the For*
esters (1856), both narratives of life in the Valley, recall
Cooper by more than their titles; but in The Youth of Jeffer-
son (1854) and its sequel, Henry St. John, Gentleman
(1859), Cooke seems as completely Virginian as Beverley
Tucker before him, though less stately in his tread. All three
of these novels have their scenes laid in Williamsburg, the
old capital of the Dominion; they reproduce a society
strangely made up of luxury, daintiness, elegance, penury,
ugliness, brutality. At times the dialogue of Cooke's impetu-

(104)