sure title to
remembrance; and his _Alnwick Castle_, a monody, half serious and half
playful on the contrast between feudal associations and modern life,
has much of that pensive lightness which characterizes Praed's best
_vers de societe_.

A friend of Drake and Halleck was James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851),
the first American novelist of distinction, and, if a popularity which
has endured for nearly three quarters of a century is any test, still
the most successful of all American novelists. Cooper was far more
intensely American than Irving, and his books reached an even wider
public. "They are published as soon as he produces them," said Morse,
the electrician, in 1833, "in thirty-four different places in Europe.
They have been seen by American travelers in the languages of Turkey
and Persia, in Constantinople, in Egypt, at Jerusalem, at Ispahan."
Cooper wrote altogether too much; he published, besides his fictions, a
_Naval History of the United States_, a series of naval biographies,
works of travel, and a great deal of controversial matter. He wrote
over thirty novels, the greater part of which are little better than
trash, and tedious trash at that. This is especially true of his
_tendenz_ novels and his novels of society. He was a man of strongly
marked individuality, fiery, pugnacious, sensitive to criticism, and
abounding in prejudices. He was embittered by the scurrilous attacks
made upon him by a portion of the American press, and spent a great
deal of time and energy in conducting libel suits against the
newspapers. In the same spirit he used fiction as a vehicle for attack
upon the abuses and follies of American life. Nearly all of his
novels, written with this design, are worthless. Nor was Cooper well
equipped by nature and temperament for depicting character and passion
in social life. Even in his best romances his heroines and his
"leading juveniles"--to borrow a term from the amateur stage--are
insipid and conventional. He was no satirist, and his humor was not of
a high order. He was a rapid and uneven writer, and, unlike Irving, he
had no style.

Where Cooper was great was in the story, in the invention of incidents
and plots, in a power of narrative and description in tales of wild
adventure which keeps the reader in breathless excitement to the end of
the book. He originated the novel of the sea and the novel of the
wilderness. He created the Indian of literature; and in this, hi