in Cooper's novels the picturesque and characteristic features of their
country were delineated by a master-hand, but in almost every European
land, translations of "The Spy," "The Pioneers," or "The Pathfinder,"
testified to the universal interest excited by the examples of
simplicity, endurance, and sagacity which formed the subjects of
Cooper's pen. In "The Pioneers," "The Last of the Mohicans," "The
Prairie," "The Pathfinder," and "The Deer-slayer" figures the character
of Leatherstocking, than whom no fictitious personage has a greater
claim to interest. His bravery, resolution, and woodland skill make him
a type of the hardy race who pushed westward the reign of civilization.
The scenes among which he lived, the primeval forest, the great inland
lakes, the hunter's camp, and Indian wigwam were described by Cooper
with a fidelity and picturesqueness which will always give to his works
a national value. Now that farms and manufacturing towns cover what a
century ago was a trackless wilderness, where backwoodsmen and Indians
shot bear and deer, it would be almost impossible for us to realize the
previous condition of our now populous country were it not for the
novels of Cooper. And this great writer not only described the wild
aspect of American scenery and the hardly less wild features of pioneer
character. He painted with equal skill the life of the American sailor,
at a time when that life had an interest and excitement it no longer
possesses. Long Tom Coffin, Tom Tiller, Bob Yarn, belonged to a period
when the United Stales was a maritime country, before American
enterprise and industry were shut off from the sea by legislative
imbecility. No marine novelist has given a more life-like impression of
a ship than Cooper, and none have excelled him in descriptions of the
sea and in studies of those peculiar forms of human nature produced by
life on the ocean. So long as Cooper confined himself to purely
national subjects, his success was brilliant and continuous; but many
of his works show the effect of misdirected talent, and have fallen