Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[73] Wallace. It is now forgotten, except one sentence: “A foreign nation is a kind of contemporaneous posterity.” In this book the later influence of Bulwer and Disraeli is palpable, but Brown's concealed chambers and aimless conspiracies and sudden mysterious deaths also reappear in full force, not without some lingering power; and then vanish from American literature forever.

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The style of the period.

Brown's style, and especially the language put by him into the mouths of his characters, is perhaps too severely criticized by Professor Woodberry as being “something never heard off the stage of melodrama.” What this able critic does not sufficiently recognize is that the general style of the period at which they were written was itself melodramatic, and that to substitute what we should call simplicity would then have made the picture wholly unfaithful. One has only to read over the private letters of any educated family of that period to see that people did not then express themselves as they do now; that they were far more ornate in expression, more involved in statement, more impassioned in speech. Even a comparatively terse writer like Prescott, in