Before the war the South had had its romancers. Kennedy and Simms and others had tried early to do for it what Cooper had done for the more northerly area. Then in the fifties John Esten Cooke (1830-1886), the best novelist the South produced during the earlier period, put forth a series of Virginia romances, the strongest of which undoubtedly was _The Virginia Comedians_, 1854, republished in 1883. The strength of the book, as indeed of all of Cooke's romances, lay in its vivacity, its enthusiasm, its stirring pictures of the more picturesque elements of the old Southern life: barbecues, horse races, contests between fiddlers, the doings of negroes, and the like. Its weakness, in addition to hasty workmanship and lack of cumulative power, was the common weakness of all the mid-century fiction. It had a _St. Elmo_ atmosphere. Like all the rest of his fiction, it is tainted with profuse sentimentality, with sensationalism, with a straining for the unexpected and the picturesque. Panels in the wall slide apart mysteriously, accidents happen in the nick of time, villains in the form of French dancing masters are foiled at last by the hero. One is in old Williamsburg, to be sure, "the Southern Boston" in its golden prime, and is impressed with its courtly manners, its beautiful women, its chivalrous heroes, its frequent duels; yet one is never quite sure whether it is the real South or whether it is not after all the story-world of an old-fashioned romancer who perhaps has never visited the South at all save in imagination. It is romanticism overdone; it is everything too much. Even its sprightliness and its occasional touches of realism cannot rescue it from oblivion. A dwelling upon the merely quaint and unusual in the local environment to arouse laughter and interest was perhaps the leading source of failure in Southern fiction even to the time of the later seventies. From the days of Longstreet's _Georgia Scenes_, pictures there had been of the "cracker," the mountaineer, the Pike, the conventional negro of the Jim Crow and the Zip Coon or the Uncle Tom type, the colonel of the fire-eating, whisky-drinking variety, but there had been no painstaking picture of real Southern life drawn with loving hand, not for mirth and wonder, not for the pointing of a moral, but for sympathy and comprehension. Horace E. Scudder as late as 1880 noted that "the South is still a foreign land to the North, and travelers are likely to bring back from it only what does not grow in the North."[121] It was true also of travelers in its books as well, for the most of its books had been written for Northern publication. The first writer really to picture the South from the heart outward, to show it not as a picturesque spectacle but as a quivering section of human life, was Thomas Nelson Page (1853----), whose first distinctive story, "Marse Chan," appeared as late as 1884.