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In calling Cooper the greatest of American novelists, we have not incurred much risk of contradiction. Others may rival–some surpass him–in this or that province of the art of fiction; but as a master of the art in its broad aspect, he is facile princeps. Brockden Brown treads a circle of mysterious power but mean circumference: Washington Irving is admirable at a sketch, one of the liveliest and most graceful of essayists, and quite equal to the higher demands of imaginative prose–witness his Rip Van Winkle and Sleepy Hollow–but his forte is in miniature, and the orthodox dimensions of three volumes post-octavo would suit him almost as ill as would the Athenian vesture of Nick Bottom the spruce proportions of royal Oberon: Haliburton is inimitable in his own line of things; his measure of wit and humour–qualities unknown, or nearly so, to Cooper–is ‘pressed down, and shaken together, and running over;’ but his ‘mission’ and Cooper’s in the tale-telling art are wide as the poles asunder: John Neale had once, particularly by his own appraisement, a high repute as the eccentric author of Logan and Seventy-six, but the repute, like the Seventy-six, is quite in the preterite tense now; and to review him and his works at this time of day would be suspiciously like a post-mortem examination, resulting possibly in a verdict of temporary insanity–if not, indeed, of felo de se–so wilful and wrongheaded were the vagaries of this ‘rough, egotistical Yankee,’ as he has been called: Herman Melville is replete with graphic power, and riots in the exuberance of a fresh, racy style; but whether he can sustain the ‘burden and heat’ of a well-equipped and full-grown novel as deftly as the fragmentary autobiographies he loves to indite; remains to be seen: Longfellow’s celebrity in fiction is limited to Hyperion and Kavanagh–clever, but slight foundations for enduring popularity–as irregular (the former at least) as Jean Paul’s nondescript stories, without the great German’s tumultuous genius: Hawthorne is probably the most noteworthy of the rising authors of America, and indeed manifests a degree of psychological knowledge and far-sighted, deep-searching observation of which there are few traces or none in Cooper; but the real prowess of the author of The Scarlet Letter is, we apprehend, still undeveloped, and the harvest of his honours a thing of the future. All these distinguished persons–not to dwell on the kindred names of Bird, Kennedy, Ware, Paulding, Myers, Willis, Poe, Sedgwick, &c.–must; yield the palm to him who has attracted all the peoples and tongues of Europe[Footnote: And, in one instance at least, of Asia also; for The Spy was translated into Persian!] to follow out the destiny of a Spy on the neutral ground, of a Pilot on the perilous coasts of a hostile race, of a Last of the Mohicans disappearing before the onward tramp of the white man.

As Rob Roy felt the pulses of life quickened when his foot was on his native heath, so Cooper wrote with vigour and aplomb only when his themes were the aboriginal forest and the melancholy main. Pity that, having discovered the fount of his strength–the Samson-lock by which alone he towered above his fellows–he had not restrained himself, and concentrated his efforts within the appointed sphere. He repudiated the oracular counsel which his own consciousness must have approved–Hoc signo vinces; and seemed to assume that whatever province he invaded, the bulletin of the campaign would be another Veni, vidi, vici. Few things can be more unsatisfactory and insipid than his attempts in the ‘silver-fork school’ of novel-writing–his dreary commonplaces of fashionable life–his faded sermonisings on domestic, and political, and social economy. Few things can be more inspiriting, more energetic, more impressive, than his pictures of

‘A wet sheet and a flowing sea,
A wind that follows fast,
And fills the white and rustling sail,
And bends the gallant mast;’

for we see in every stroke that the world of waters is his home, and that to his ear there is music in the wild piping of the wind, and that his eye beams afresh when it descries tempest in the horned moon, and lightning in the cloud. To him the ocean is indeed ‘a glorious mirror,’ where the form of the Highest ‘glasses itself in tempests;’ dear to him it is