Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

4

MEMOIRS OF AN EDITOR

ten square miles by no means meant ten miles square.
"The Letters of Junius" were there, shoulder to shoulder
with "Baron Munchausen" illustrated by Rowlandson,
and a small but variegated assortment of biography and
fiction, ranging from the "Life of David Garrick" in two
volumes, boards, and "Uncle Tom's Cabin; or Life among
the Lowly," written by Mrs. Stowe in Brunswick, nine
miles away from Bath, and published first in book form
in the year of my birth-ranging from these to what was
then to me perhaps the most engaging thing in the collection, the ungrown first edition of the "Life of P. T.
Barnum, Written by Himself."
Yet am I quite sure of Barnum's election? For beyond "Sandford and Merton," British exemplars of desirable and undesirable youth for whom I never greatly
cared, stood another Connecticut product, "Alonzo and
Melissa: A Tale," lacking the title-page with locus and
date and possibly the author's name, but apparently
printed not long after the Revolutionary War. The inspiration was Richardson rather than Fielding; "Waverley" was yet to come, "Pride and Prejudice" was far
in the future, Fenimore Cooper farther still; but behold
an American novelist with something of Scott and something of Jane Austen and something of Cooper, romancing
intrepidly if naively of love and adventure and actually
showing the spunk to introduce the great Doctor Benjamin Franklin not only as a loquacious character in the
story but even as the determining factor in its plot. Let
me tarry a moment over this early favorite. It was the
first formally constructed novel I ever read. Here is the
book itself, with its once familiar pages unopened by me
for two and sixty years. How stately and yet candid the

promise of the preface!
It is believed that the story contains no indecorous stimulants;
nor is it filled with unmeaning and inexplicated incidents, sound