saw and described. So much so that Cooper has been accused of creating,
in his novels, a sort of Indians which never existed either here or
elsewhere. There is no doubt, however, that he studied carefully such
Indians as were in his day to be found, and had some basis of fact for
the qualities which he imparted to the Indians of his imagination. Miss
Cooper says that her father followed Indian delegations from town to
town, observing them carefully, conversing with them freely, and was
impressed "with the vein of poetry and of laconic eloquence marking
their brief speeches."

Brander Matthews says that if there is any lack of faithfulness in
Cooper's presentation of the Indian character, it is due to the fact
that he was a romancer, and therefore an optimist, bent on making the
best of things. He told the truth as he saw it, and nothing but the
truth; but he did not tell the whole truth. Here Cooper was akin to
Scott, who chose to dwell only on the bright side of chivalry, and to
picture the merry England of Richard Lionheart as a pleasanter period to
live in than it could have been in reality. Cooper's red men are
probably closer to the actual facts than Scott's black knights and white
ladies.[15]

Cooper himself comes to the defense of his Indians in the preface of the
_Leather-Stocking Tales_. "It is the privilege of all writers of
fiction," he declares, "more particularly when their works aspire to the
elevation of romances, to present the _beau-ideal_ of their characters
to the reader. This it is which constitutes poetry, and to suppose that
the red man is to be represented only in the squalid misery or in the
degraded moral state that certainly more or less belongs to his
condition, is, we apprehend, taking a very narrow view of an author's
privileges. Such criticism would have deprived the world of even Homer."