European public at the moment of learning from Cooper's romances that one could live in New York, be born on the banks of the Delaware, imitate nobody and yet possess genius. For some time critics had decided that talent was irreconcileable with one's quality of American. A Dutch danseuse, an Esquimaux Venus de Medicis would not have been received with a profounder surprise, that a good novelist or poet, brought up in the United States, that mercantile country, that nation insensible to art, give a rival to Walter Scott!

There were writers of Scottish history before the author of Old Mortality. Scottish superstitions and customs had furnished the subject of numerous and careful researches. Mrs. Grant, Burns, Allan Ramsay, Buchanan, Macpherson, had preceded Walter Scott. Cooper had no predecessor. Unworn paths presented themselves to him on every side. An inexhaustible variety of materials; scenes demanding a theatre; pictures demanding a frame; points of view asking for a painter; everywhere novelty, quaintness, marvels: a quite modern interest, a people hardly out of swaddling clothes and already mighty; a history whose first pages gleam with civilization, and speak of conquest; the singularity of calm, pious, persevering heroism; the names of Washington, Penn, Franklin; for background the forest of ages; for actors, the Apostles of the New World treating with the children of the wigwam and the calumet; the progress of European art in the midst of these masterless solitudes; the combat between son and father-of the oppressed with the oppressor; these demanding, those wishing to destroy liberty and tolerance: what do I know-perhaps a new social era is now born for the world and will issue from Philadelphia !

Cooper has seized with vigorous frankness the scattered. elements which he found before him. He was careful not to corrupt their charm, or to change their purity, by an imitation

of the Roman or the Greek; he has told, even in the language of the United States, the extraordinary adventures whose theatre was that vast continent or its surrounding seas.

Those who play in his drama, have come out from the hut of the colonist, the cabin of the savage, the shop of the tradesman; the gigantic nature of the land reflects itself in his books as in a mirror.

For his compatriots, Cooper was the Homer of their civilization; the bard who perpetuated their glory. he gave a pleasure till then unknown.

To Europeans

I have not concealed his faults of manner. We can pardon them, in consideration of their intimate analogy with the author and his race.

Cooper is Calvinist; he tells a fact dryly, but with a profundity and truth which fascinate the hearer. He searches no éclat in his descriptions; he does not give colored or dark masses. He manages the whole so well, enriches it so exactly with its constituent elements, that you fancy you can distinguish each detail; be it a forest cabin; a vulgar hearthside, a wreck floating in the distance, he forces you to read, by his perfect exactitude, his extreme truth; and the description of a trivial object, without picturesque charms, will be to you more interesting than that of a magnificent site, a sublime spectacle, vaguely drawn or daubed with vivid colors. The women even, who always look for action and interest in a novel, have not the courage to skip the descriptions of Cooper. If you begin to read, you must devour all. Yet, he repeats himself; he goes over and over the portrait already sketched by his pencil. He will not omit one plank of the frigate, one tree of the wood. His diction is slow, sometimes even laborious and embarrassed; but it reproduces everything, greengleaming savannahs, stretches of sand, old oaks and limitless

deserts; lakes like the oceans-the shadows of those forests whose shadows are eternal.

Let him go upon the sea, and his enthusiasm becomes a religious passion. You would say that the waves were his, so beautiful in their terror, so sublime in their truth are his maritime pictures. He does not show you the phantom of a vessel or the phantom of an ocean; a painted ship upon a painted sea; but all, on his barks or around them, is action and life, character and poetry.

Enemy of the vague, never pleased with it, nor admitting it into his pictures, he surrounds you with accessories so numerous, so true, so detailed that even their insignificance adds to the truth of the whole. The sails swell, the cables rattle, the yards creak, the tar smokes, the sailors sing, the captain whistles, the billow foams, the wave strikes noisily the side of the ship. There is no more land, nor anything that recalls it. But when the land reappears, you find yourself cast upon a new shore, deserted, unknown.

He is the most positive novelist that ever existed. He anatomises without idealizing. Sometimes his portraits border on caricature; his defect is that he exaggerates and seeks out too curiously their characteristic traits. He is never false, but he dissects his model. Some of his personages are grotesque, others bizarre. There is every description of character in his works from baseness to heroism, from gaiety to terror; all stand out from the canvas, speak to the imagination, and having arrested the attention, are recognized as human, as beings who have lived, and who would still be alive if the narrator had not analyzed them to death. His portraits of women, however, exhibit an almost Shakspearian delicacy of observation. They are not women of the court, nor elegant women; they are not superhuman beings, but women. Goodness, sweetness, natural grace and a naïve majesty sur

round them with a charming halo. Their beauty and devotion lighten and console the most inaccessible retreats, solace the sorrows of the man, and pour balm upon his wounds. Moral sentiment joined to their physical beauty, patience and serenity of soul constitute their characteristics. A good housekeeper, the wife of Heathcote in the Borderers, for instance, is far more charming than all oriental sylphs, or the brilliant princesses of Calprenede; her exterior is not remarkable, her life is peaceable and humble; well-being and repose are around her; treasures of gentleness and charity are in her bosom. In a word it is a woman.

Among the numerous novels published by Cooper, that which is most characteristically original, is the "Last of the Mohicans." You would look vainly in the whole library of romance for its parallel. Smollett's or Fielding's sailors, or Scott's beggars have disappeared. The eternal family of heroes, who perpetuate themselves from fiction to fiction has vanished. You are in a new world where the original genius of the human race exists in its majesty. The child of the wilderness rises and paints himself before you. He has neither ornaments nor dress. He is alone, apart, a stranger to all civilization; master of all around him, recognizing no master himself. King of his wilderness, he has no slaves. The passions, vices, virtues of society are to him unknown. Surrounding nature is grand, like himself. She has secret pleasures for him which the rest of the world ignore. This romance so full of magic and marvellous freshness, makes us live the life of primitive solitudes, and makes us the friend of man as they nurture him.

How remarkable and true are the characters of this drama. All bear the impression of the powerful hand which traced them. The old Indian and his son are symbols of the savage life. Still more do I admire Longue Carabine, a being placed

between the wilderness and civilization; intermediate link between social industry and primitive independence. He is neither European nor wild Indian. The reflecting heroism which follows civilization, tempers the violent heroism which pervades it. If he have not quite lost the desire of vengeance and the stoicism of his fathers, he yet guesses instinctively the scrupulous demands of honor, and raises himself to a generosity whose grandeur he feels.

The Prairie contains characteristic and detailed descriptions; it is the most beautiful picture of the kind drawn by his pen. After having read it, you could fancy that you had lived on the banks of those streams, a thousand times crossed that prairie; questioned those charming scenes, and made them echo with your voice. We must add that this pleasure is purchased by an ennui caused by spinnings-out, and digressions and that this picture, so faithful, may be charged with prolixity.

The Spy has its partisans. Harvey Birch is a dramatic creation to sacrifice to one's country not only life, but honor, is the greatest of sacrifices. How can one help admiring this hero of patriotism, who makes a glory of his infamy, and inwardly consoles himself for the opprobrium which covers him, by the sentiment of what he has done for his country. As to Washington, Cooper has idealized him with great talent; a no easy matter.

The interest of the Borderers is the most powerful. The Red Rover and the Pilot are greater as maritime pictures than as romances; nor does the Water Witch yield to these latter. Everything is picturesque, energetic and yet positive. The real and magnificent are mingled.

I love Tom Coffin, king of the deep, who cannot live on land, who breathes more freely on a lake, begins to enjoy existence on the Mediterranean, and finds himself in posses