own helplessness.

All this is, in itself, of slight importance when set off against
positive merits. But it is constantly forced upon the reader's attention
by the fact that Cooper himself was exceedingly critical on points of
speech. He was perpetually going out of his way to impart bits of
information about words and their uses, and it is rare that he blunders
into correct statement or right inference. He often, indeed, in these
matters carried ignorance of what he was talking about, and confidence
in his own knowledge of it to the extremest verge of the possible. He
sometimes mistook dialectic or antiquated English for classical, and
laboriously corrected the latter by putting the former in parentheses by
its side. In orthography and pronunciation he had never got beyond that
puerile conception which fancies it a most creditable feature in a word
that its sound shall not be suggested by anything in its spelling. In
the case of proper names this was more than creditable; it was
aristocratic. So in "The Crater" great care is taken to tell us that the
hero's name, though written Woolston, was pronounced Wooster; and that
he so continued to sound it in spite of a miserable Yankee pedagogue who
tried hard to persuade him to follow the spelling. So, again, in "The
Ways of the Hour" we are sedulously informed that Wilmeter is to be
pronounced Wilmington. But absurdities like these belonged not so much
to Cooper as to the good old times of gentlemanly ignorance in (p. 275)
which he lived. In his etymological vagaries, however, he sometimes left
his age far behind. In "The Oak Openings" he enters upon the discussion
of the word "shanty." He finds the best explanation of its origin is to
suppose it a corruption of _chiente_, a word which he again supposed
might exist in Canadian French, and provided it existed there, he
further supposed that in that dialect it might mean "dog-kennel." The
student of language, much hardened to this sort of work on the part of
men of letters, can read with resignation "this plausible derivation,"
as it is styled. Cooper, however, not content with the simple glory of
originating it, actually uses throughout the whole work _chiente_
instead of "shanty." This rivals, if it does not outdo, the linguistic
excesses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

There are imperfections far more serious than these mistakes in
language. He rarely attained to beauty of style. The rapidity with which