fiction. Hardly less individual and vital were the various types of
Indian character, in Chingachgook, Uncas, Hist, and the Huron warriors.
Inferior to these, but still vigorously though somewhat roughly drawn,
were the waifs and strays of civilization, whom duty, or the hope of
gain, or the love of adventure, or the outlawry of crime had driven to
the wilderness--the solitary trapper, the reckless young frontiersman,
the officers and men of out-post garrisons. Whether Cooper's Indian
was the real being, or an idealized and rather melodramatic version of
the truth, has been a subject of dispute. However this be, he has
taken his place in the domain of art, and it is safe to say that his
standing there is secure. No boy will ever give him up.

Equally good with the _Leatherstocking_ novels, and equally national,
were Cooper's tales of the sea, or at least the best two of them--the
_Pilot_, 1833, founded upon the daring exploits of John Paul Jones, and
the _Red Rover_, 1828. But here, though Cooper still holds the sea, he
has had to admit competitors; and Britannia, who rules the waves in
song, has put in some claim to a share in the domain of nautical
fiction in the persons of Mr. W. Clark Russell and others. Though
Cooper's novels do not meet the deeper needs of the heart and the
imagination, their appeal to the universal love of a story is
perennial. We devour them when we are boys, and if we do not often
return to them when we are men, that is perhaps only because we have
read them before, and "know the ending." They are good yarns for the
forecastle and the camp-fire; and the scholar in his study, though he
may put the _Deerslayer_ or the _Last of the Mohicans_ away on the top
shelf, will take it down now and again, and sit up half the night over
it.

Before dismissing the _belles-lettres_ writings of this period, mention