nteresting that they belong to a race, like the heroic age, now wellnigh
extinct. He paints the adventures, the life, the ideas, the passions, the
combined pride and indolence, valour and craft, heroism and meanness of
the red men, with the hand of a master. Equally admirable is his
delineation of the white man of the frontier of civilization--Hawkeye or
Leather-stocking, with his various other denominations--who is the
precursor, as it were, of European invasion, who plunges into the forest
far ahead of his more tardy followers, and leads the roaming life of the
Indian, but with the advantage of the arms, the arts, and the perseverance
of the Anglo-Saxon. But he is strictly a national writer. It is in the
delineation of Transatlantic character, scenes of the forest, or naval
adventures, that his great powers are shown; when he comes to paint the
manners, or lay the seat of his conceptions in Europe, he at once falls
to mediocrity, and sometimes becomes ridiculous.

Manzoni is an author of the highest excellence, whose celebrity has been
derived from the same faithful delineation from real life of national
manners. He has written but one novel, the _Promessi Sposi_; though
various other works, some religious, some historical, have proceeded from
his pen. But that one novel has given him a European reputation. It is
wholly different in composition and character from any other historical
romance in existence: it has no affinity either with Scott or Cooper,
Bulwer or James. The scene, laid in 1628, at the foot of the mountains
which shut in the Lake of Como, transports us back two centuries in point
of time, and to the south of the Alps in point of scene. As might be
expected, the ideas, characters, and incidents of such a romance differ
widely from those of northern climes and Protestant realms. That is one of
its great charms. We are transported, as it were, into a new world; and
yet a world so closely connected with our own, by the manners and ideas of
chivalry, our once common Catholic faith, and the associations which every
person of education has with Italian scenes and images, that we feel, in
traversing it, the pleasure of novelty without the _ennui_ of a strange
land. No translation could give an idea of the peculiar beauties and
excellences of the original. As might be expected, the feudal baron and
the Catholic church enter largely into the composition of the story. The
lustful passions, savage violence, and unbri