thoroughly masculine. He is deficient in acute perception, in delicate
discrimination, in fine analysis, in the skill to seize and arrest
exceptional peculiarities; but he has in large measure the power to
present the broad characteristics of universal humanity. It is to this
power that he owes his wide popularity. At this moment, in every public
and circulating library in England or America, the novels of Cooper will
be found to be in constant demand. He wrote for the many, and not for the
few; he hit the common mind between wind and water; a delicate and
fastidious literary appetite may not be attracted to his productions, but
the healthy taste of the natural man finds therein food alike convenient
and savory.

In a manly, courageous, somewhat impulsive nature like Cooper's we should
expect to find prejudices; and he was a man of strong prejudices. Among
others, was an antipathy to the people of New England. His characters,
male and female, are frequently Yankees, but they are almost invariably
caricatures; that is, they have all the unamiable characteristics and
unattractive traits which are bestowed upon the people of New England by
their ill-wishers. Had he ever lived among them, with his quick powers of
observation and essentially kindly judgment of men and life, he could not
have failed to correct his misapprehensions, and to perceive that he had
taken the reverse side of the tapestry for the face.

Cooper, with a very keen sense of injustice, conscious of inexhaustible
power, full of vehement impulses, and not largely endowed with that safe
quality called prudence, was a man likely to get involved in
controversies. It was his destiny, and he never could have avoided it, to
be in opposition to the dominant public sentiment around him. Had he been
born in Russia, he could hardly have escaped a visit to Siberia; had he
been born in Austria, he would have wasted some of his best years in