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The Indians have become comparatively seedy and second-hand individuals; the scenery, with occasional exceptions, looks worn; the machinery creaks and betrays itself, no longer possessing the ars celare artem. ”Tis true, ’tis pity; pity ’tis, ’tis true.’ One novelty, nevertheless, this tale can boast, and that is the very able and interesting sketch of the bee-hunter following his vocation in the ‘oak-openings;’ nor is the portrait of Buzzing Ben himself an ordinary daub. In 1849 appeared The Sea-Lions, a clever but often prolix work, which ought to keep up its interest with the public, if only for its elaborate painting of scenes to which the protracted mystery of Sir John Franklin’s expedition has imparted a melancholy charm. The sufferings of sealers and grasping adventurers among ‘thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice’ are recounted with dramatic earnestness. The Ways of the Hour was both ‘nominally’ and ‘really’ Cooper’s last novel: he announced it as such; and the announcement was not related to that fallacious category to which belong the ‘more last nights’ of popular tragedians, and the farewell prefaces of the accomplished author of Rienzi. It was not the ‘going, going!’ but the ‘gone!’ of the auctioneer. And critics maliciously said: Tant mieux. In The Ways of the Hour there was one vigorous portrait, Mary Monson, and several ‘moving accidents by flood and field:’ but with these positive qualities the reader had to accept an unlimited stock of negatives. Besides the works thus referred to, Cooper wrote at short intervals a ‘serried phalanx’ of others, from the ranks of which suffice it to name The Heidenmauer, The Bravo, The Manikins (a weak and injudicious tale, quite unworthy of his honourable reputation), The Headsman of Berne, Mercedes of Castille, Satanstoe, Home as Found, Ashore and Afloat. In miscellaneous literature his writings include a History of the Navy of the United States, Lives of Distinguished Naval Officers, Sketches of Switzerland, Gleanings in Europe, and Notions of the Americans.

It is by his early tales of wilderness and ocean life that he will survive. There his genius is fresh, vigorous, natural–uncramped by restraints, undeformed by excrescences, uninterrupted by crotchets, such as injured its aftergrowth–the swaddling-clothes of its second childhood. If we have spoken freely–we hope not flippantly–of these feeblenesses, it is because the renown of Cooper is too tenaciously and permanently rooted to be ‘radically’ affected thereby, however they may diminish the symmetry and dim the verdure of blossom and branch. His magnificent panoramas of prairie solitude, his billowy expanses of the ‘many-voiced sea,’ his artistically-grouped figures of red-skins and trappers, sealers and squatters, are among the things which Anglo-Saxon literature in either hemisphere will not willingly let die. By these he is, and long will be, known and read of all men. And if ever Mr Macaulay’s New Zealander should ponder over the ruins of Broadway, as well as of St Paul’s, he will probably carry in his pocket one of those romances which tell how the Last of the Mohicans came to his end, and which illustrate the closing destinies of tribes which shall then have disappeared before the chill advance of the Pale Face.