rary labors during these twenty-nine years. We must add five volumes
of naval history and biography, ten volumes of travels and sketches in
Europe, and a large amount of occasional and controversial writings, most
of which is now hidden away in that huge wallet wherein Time puts his alms
for Oblivion. His literary productions other than his novels would alone
be enough to save him from the reproach of idleness. In estimating a
writer's claims to honor and remembrance, the quantity as well as the
quality of his work should surely be taken into account; and in summing up
the case of our great novelist to the jury of posterity, this point should
be strongly put.

Cooper's first novel, "Precaution," was published when he was in his
thirty-first year. It owed its existence to an accident, and was but an
ordinary production, as inferior to the best of his subsequent works as
Byron's "Hours of Idleness" to "Childe Harold." It was a languid and
colorless copy of exotic forms: a mere scale picked from the surface of
the writer's mind, with neither beauty nor vital warmth to commend it. We
speak from the vague impressions which many long years have been busy in
effacing; and we confess that it would require the combined forces of a
long voyage and a scanty library to constrain us to the task of reading it
anew.

And yet, such as it was, it made a certain impression at the time of its
appearance. The standard by which it was tried was very unlike that which
would now be applied to it: there was all the difference between the two
that there is between strawberries in December and strawberries in June.
American literature was then just beginning to "glint forth" like Burns's
mountain daisy, and rear its tender form above the parent earth. The time
had, indeed, gone by--which a friend of ours, not yet venerable, affirms
he can well remember--when school-boys and collegians, zealous for the
honor of indigenous literature, were obliged to cite, by way of
illustration, such works as Morse's Geography and Hannah Adams's "History
of the Jews"; but it was only a faint, crepuscular light, that streaked
the east, and gave promise of the coming day. Irving had just completed
his "Sketch-Book," which was basking in the full sunshine of unqualified
popularity. Dana, in the thoughtful and meditative beauty of "The Idle
Man," was addressing a more limited public. Percival had just before
published a small volume of poems; Halleck's "Fanny" had re