at once perceiving that Sancho
Panza, and the peasants and muleteers in _Don Quixote_, are faithfully
drawn from real life. Few of the innumerable readers of Sir Walter have
had personal means of judging of the fidelity of his pictures of the
manners and ideas of the Scotch peasants in his earlier novels; but yet
there is no one in any country who does not at once see that they have
been drawn from nature, and contain the most faithful picture of it. It is
the fidelity of this picture which gives the Scotch novels their great
charm. It is the same with Fielding: his leading characters in low life
are evidently drawn from nature, and thence his long-continued popularity.
When Sir Walter comes to paint the manners of the middle classes or
peasants in England, from plays, farces, and the descriptions of others,
as in _Kenilworth_, _Woodstock_, _Peveril of the Peak_, and the _Fortunes
of Nigel_, he is infinitely inferior, and, in truth, often insupportably
dull. His dialogue is a jargon mixed up of scraps and expressions from old
plays or quaint tracts, such as no man on earth ever did speak, and which
it is only surprising a man of his sagacity should have supposed they ever
could. The same defect is more signally conspicuous in the dialogue of
several of the historical romances of James.

It is the accurate and faithful picture of national character from real
life, joined to the poetical interest of his Indian warriors, and his
incomparable powers of natural description, which has given Cooper his
great and well-deserved reputation. In many of the essential qualities of
a novelist, he is singularly defective. His story is often confused, and
awkwardly put together. Unity of interest is seldom thought of. He has no
conception of the refined manners and chivalrous feelings of European
society: though he has of late years seen much of it in many countries, he
has never been able to become familiar with its ideas, or imbibe its
spirit. His heroes, among the white men at least, are never any thing
above American skippers, or English subalterns or post-captains: his
heroines have in general the insipidity which is, we hope unjustly,
ascribed, with great personal charms, to the fair sex on the other side of
the Atlantic. But in the forest or on the wave, he is superb. His _Last of
the Mohicans_ and _Prairie_ are noble productions, to be matched with any
in the world for the delineation of lofty and elevated character--the more
i