rits on this point. Are
his stories, simply as stories, well told? Are his plots symmetrically
constructed and harmoniously evolved? Are his incidents probable? and do
they all help on the catastrophe? Does he reject all episodical matter
which would clog the current of the narrative? Do his novels have unity of
action? or are they merely a series of sketches, strung together without
any relation of cause and effect? Cooper, tried by these rules, can
certainly command no praise. His plots are not carefully or skilfully
constructed. His incidents are not probable in themselves, nor do they
succeed each other in a natural and dependent progression. His characters
get into scrapes from which the reasonable exercise of common faculties
should have saved them; and they are rescued by incredible means and
impossible instruments. The needed man appears as unaccountably and
mysteriously as if he had dropped from the clouds, or emerged from the
sea, or crept up through a fissure in the earth. The winding up of his
stories is often effected by devices nearly as improbable as a violation
of the laws of Nature. His personages act without adequate motives; they
rush into needless dangers; they trust their fate, with unsuspecting
simplicity, to treacherous hands.

In works of fiction the skill of the writer is most conspicuously shown
when the progress of the story is secured by natural and probable
occurrences. Many events take place in history and in common life which
good taste rejects as inadmissible in a work of imagination. Sudden death
by disease or casualty is no very uncommon occurrence in real life; but it
cannot be used in a novel to clear up a tangled web of circumstance,
without betraying something of a poverty of invention in the writer. He is
the best artist who makes least use of incidents which lie out of the
beaten path of observation and experience. In constructive skill Cooper's
rank is not high; for all his novels are more or less open to the
criticism that too frequent use is made in them of events very unlikely to
have happened. He leads his characters into such formidable perils that
the chances are a million to one against their being rescued. Such a run
is made upon our credulity that the fund is soon exhausted, and the bank
stops payment.

For illustration of the above strictures we will refer to a single novel,
"The Last of the Mohicans," which everybody will admit to be one of the
most interesting of his