at paramount and
essential merit in a novelist of fertility of invention. The resources of
his genius, alike in the devising of incidents and the creation of
character, are inexhaustible. His scenes are laid on the sea and in the
forest,--in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Spain,--amid the refinements
and graces of civilization and the rudeness and hardships of frontier and
pioneer life; but everywhere he moves with an easy and familiar tread, and
everywhere, though there may be the motive and the cue for minute
criticism, we recognize the substantial truth of his pictures. In all his
novels the action is rapid and the movement animated: his incidents may
not be probable, but they crowd upon each other so thickly that we have
not time to raise the question: before one impression has become familiar,
the scene changes, and new objects enchain the attention. All rapid motion
is exhilarating alike to mind and body; and in reading Cooper's novels we
feel a pleasure analogous to that which stirs the blood when we drive a
fast horse or sail with a ten-knot breeze. This fruitfulness in the
invention of incidents is nearly as important an element in the
composition of a novelist as a good voice in that of a singer. A powerful
work of fiction may be produced by a writer who has not this gift; but
such works address a comparatively limited public. To the common mind no
faculty in the novelist is so fascinating as this. "Caleb Williams" is a
story of remarkable power; but "Ivanhoe" has a thousand readers to its
one.

In estimating novelists by the number and variety of characters with which
they have enriched the repertory of fiction, Cooper's place, if not the
highest, is very high. The fruitfulness of his genius in this regard is
kindred to its fertility in the invention of incidents. We can pardon in a
portrait-gallery of such extent here and there an ill-drawn figure or a
face wanting in expression. With the exception of Scott, and perhaps of
Dickens, what writer of prose fiction has created a greater number of
characters such as stamp themselves upon the memory so that an allusion to
them is well understood in cultivated society? Fielding has drawn country
squires, and Smollett has drawn sailors; but neither has intruded upon the
domain of the other, nor could he have made the attempt without failure.
Some of our living novelists have a limited list of characters; they have
half a dozen types which we recognize as inevitably