Mayne Reid

I think Mayne Reid looks a bit roughed up here.  He was good friends with Edgar Allen Poe and they both got roughed up.  Mayne had got shot in the hip during the Mexican War and it never healed.  It was always oozing pus and he couldn't walk much without crutches.

They both seem a bit like fops in their dress and manner, but their writing is forceful and hallucinatory.

Mayne Reid I think was the first person I think to talk about Judge Holden, though maybe not, I read a book from 1848 (in great condition mind you) and he is given a startled description in that book.

Well Mayne was a great looking guy when he just got here from Ireland.  Always a bit fanciful but still a handsome young man.

Time and life and living definitely have a a way  of chewing us up before they spit us out.

I would guess you expect me to list my favorite of his books, but I won't cause I suspect you don't care.
What I will do is just give you one of my favorite quotes, this one from The Scalp Hunters.  I used it in one of my paintings so it stands out for me:

page 317

As I walked to the parapet, there was a scene below that filled me with apprehension.  A cloud seemed to fall over my heart.
The impression was sudden, and at the moment, indefinite as to it's cause. Was it the sight (for I saw it) of blood? No. It could not be that, and I had become accustomed to its wanton shedding.  It may have been partially the cause, but there were other sights and sounds, hardly affecting the eye and ear, yet sufficiently definite to impress my mind with fear and foreboding.
There was a bad electricity in the air -not the natural, but the moral atmosphere -that reached me through those mysterious channels not yet traced by philosophy.
Look back upon your experience.  Have you not often felt sensible that wrath or other bad passions existed in the minds of men before you could perceive it by any definite look, word, or action?
As the wild animal foretells the hurricane when the atmosphere is tranquil, I instinctively felt that a dark scene was approaching.

He was an enormously popular in Victorian times and was a favorite world wide of such later notable men as the youthful Arthur Conan Doyle, Vladimir Nabakov and Theodore Roosevelt.

You gotta wonder why talk about him at all.  Well I like him.  And I 

think there are those of you out there who might also like him.  That's all really.