story celebrates. There was, moreover, an
excess of that cheap moralizing, that dwelling upon commonplace truths,
which was another of Cooper's besetting sins. The only effect these
discourses have upon the reader is to make him feel that while virtue
may be a very good thing, it is an excessively tedious thing. As a
novel, "Mercedes of Castile" must be regarded as a failure. On the other
hand, as a story of the first voyage of Columbus, told with the special
knowledge of a seaman, the accuracy of an historian, and with something
of the fervor of a poet, it will always have a peculiar interest of its
own.

Two sea-stories followed "The Deerslayer." The first of these, entitled
"The Two Admirals," was published in April, 1842, and the second in
November of the same year. Cooper was at this time engaged in the
hottest of his fight with the American press and people. Publicly and
privately he was expressing his contempt for nearly everything and
everybody. He, in turn, was undergoing assaults from every quarter. It
is, therefore, a singular illustration of the love of country which
burned in him with an intense, even when hidden, flame, that in (p. 243)
in the midst of his greatest unpopularity he was unwilling to desert his
own flag for that of the land to which he was forced to go for material.
Yet there was every inducement. He wished to do what had never before
been done in fiction. His aim was to describe the evolutions of fleets
instead of confining himself to the movements of single vessels. But no
American fleet had ever been assembled, no American admiral had ever
trod a quarter-deck. In order, therefore, to describe operations on a
grand scale he had to have recourse to the history of the
mother-country; but he purposely put the scene in "The Two Admirals" in
a period when the states were still colonies. This novel takes a very
high place among the sea-stories, so long as the action is confined to
the water. But it suffers greatly from the carelessness and the
incompleteness with which the details are worked out.

In "Wing-and-Wing," which followed it, the fortune of a French privateer
is told. The scene is laid in the Mediterranean, and the time is the end
of the last century. Though inferior in power to some of his other
sea-stories, it is far from being a poor novel; and it was, in fact, one
of the author's favorites. But its greatest interest is in the view it
gives of a tendency in Cooper's character wh