d who had evolved a kind of formula for
the novel, ready for Cooper's use. Both men were natural story-tellers.
Scott had the richer mind and the more fully developed historical
imagination. Both were out-of-doors men, lovers of manly adventure and
of natural beauty. But the American had the good fortune to be able to
utilize in his books his personal experiences of forest and sea and to
reveal to Europe the real romance of the American wilderness.

That Cooper was the first to perceive the artistic possibilities of
this romance, no one would claim. Brockden Brown, a Quaker youth of
Philadelphia, a disciple of the English Godwin, had tried his hand at
the very end of the eighteenth century upon American variations of the
Gothic romance then popular in England. Brown had a keen eye for the
values of the American landscape and even of the American Indian. He had
a knack for passages of ghastly power, as his descriptions of maniacs,
murderers, sleep-walkers, and solitaries abundantly prove. But he had
read too much and lived too little to rival the masters of the art of
fiction. And there was a traveled Frenchman, Chateaubriand, surely an
expert in the art of eloquent prose, who had transferred to the pages
of his American Indian stories, "Atala" and "Rene," the mystery and
enchantment of our dark forests and endless rivers. But Chateaubriand,
like Brockden Brown, is feverish. A taint of old-world eroticism and
despair hovers like a miasma over his magnificent panorama of the
wilderness. Cooper, like Scott, is masculine.

He was a Knickerbocker only by adoption. Born in New Jersey, his
childhood was spent in the then remote settlement of Cooperstown in
Central New York. He had a little schooling at Albany, and a brief and
inglorious career at Yale with the class of 1806. He went to sea for two
years, and then served for three years in the United States Navy upon
Lakes Ontario and Champlain, the very scene of some of his best stories.
In 1811 he married, resigned from the Navy, and settled upon a little
estate in Westchester County, near New York. Until the age of thirty, he
was not in the least a bookman, but a healthy, man of action. Then, as
the well-known anecdote goes, he exclaims to his wife, after reading a
stupid English novel, "I believe I could write a better story myself."
"Precaution" (1820) was the result, but whether it was better than the
unknown English book, no one can now say. It was bad enough. Yet the
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