d philanthropist.

Cooper was certainly one of the most popular authors that have ever
written. His stories have been translated into nearly all the languages
of Europe and into some of those of Asia. Balzac admired him greatly,
but with discrimination; Victor Hugo pronounced him greater than the
great master of modern romance, and this verdict was echoed by a
multitude of inferior readers, who were satisfied with no title for
their favourite less than that of "the American Scott." As a satirist
and observer he is simply the "Cooper who's written six volumes to prove
he's as good as a Lord" of Lowell's clever portrait; his enormous vanity
and his irritability find vent in a sort of dull violence, which is
exceedingly tiresome. It is only as a novelist that he deserves
consideration. His qualities are not those of the great masters of
fiction; but he had an inexhaustible imagination, some faculty for
simple combination of incident, a homely tragic force which is very
genuine and effective, and up to a certain point a fine narrative power.
His literary training was inadequate; his vocabulary is limited and his
style awkward and pretentious; and he had a fondness for moralizing
tritely and obviously, which mars his best passages. In point of
conception, each of his three-and-thirty novels is either absolutely
good or is possessed of a certain amount of merit; but hitches occur in
all, so that every one of them is remarkable rather in its episodes than
as a whole. Nothing can be more vividly told than the escape of the
Yankee man-of-war through the shoals and from the English cruisers in
_The Pilot_, but there are few things flatter in the range of fiction
than the other incidents of the novel. It is therefore with some show of
reason that _The Last of the Mohicans_, which as a chain of brilliantly
narrated episodes is certainly the least faulty in this matter of
sustained excellence of execution, should be held to be the best of his
works.

The personages of his drama are rather to be accounted as so much
painted cloth and cardboard, than as anything approaching the nature of
men and women. As a creator of aught but romantic incident, indeed,
Cooper's claims to renown must rest on the fine figure of the
Leatherstocking, and, in a less degree, on that of his friend and
companion, the Big Serpent. The latter has many and obvious merits, not
the least of which is the pathos shed about him in his last incarnation
as the Indi