Having disposed of "The Confessions of
Maria Monk" and "Night Life in Paris," he turned to Rabelais and the
Decameron, and having driven these ancients under the book-counters, he
pounced upon Zola, Balzac and Daudet, and having disposed of these too,
he began a _pogrom_ which, in other hands, eventually brought down such
astounding victims as Thomas Hardy's "Jude the Obscure" and Harold
Frederic's "The Damnation of Theron Ware." All through the eighties and
nineties this ecstatic campaign continued, always increasing in violence
and effectiveness. Comstock became a national celebrity; his doings were
as copiously reported by the newspapers as those of P. T. Barnum or John
L. Sullivan. Imitators sprang up in all the larger cities: there was
hardly a public library in the land that did not begin feverishly
expurgating its shelves; the publication of fiction, and particularly of
foreign fiction, took on the character of an extra hazardous enterprise.
Not, of course, that the reign of terror was not challenged, and
Comstock himself denounced.
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