American history, American development being of a melodramatic character, it is natural that the opposite to Sunday-school literature should rapidly take root as soon as begun. A period of the ten-cent novel flourished about 1860, when the Beadle Brothers, who were finally to be merged into the publishing house of George Munro, began the publication of their series of cheap volumes--the sensationalism of Cooper raised to the _n_th power. To-day there are men who glow with remembered enthusiasm over Colonel Prentiss Ingraham and the detective stories of A. W. Aiken--whose record was often one a week--as they do over the name of Hemyng _alias_ Jack Harkaway, or Mayne Reid, with his traditional profanity. Edward S. Ellis (b. 1840) was one of the young members of this group of writers. He became inoculated, but was forced, when the milder process came into vogue, to soften his high lights, and to accord with the times. What such early “wild cat” literature did, however, for present upholders of the “series” books, was to exemplify that, by a given pattern, a tale could be made to “go” to order. There was then, as there is now, a certain type of book, neither moral nor immoral, and not at all educational, but only momentarily diverting; written without motive, without definite object, but whose ground plan and mechanism were workable. The increase of the public-school system was the chief opponent of the Sunday-school book, as it likewise, by its educational emphasis, fought against the dime-novel vogue. And with the inception of the public school on its present large scale we reach the immediate stage, the era of over-productivity, with its enormous average taste, with its public regard for readers in the libraries, for scholars in the class-rooms, for the poor in settlements, and for the emigrant on the high seas.