animosities against the mother country on the other. It is no exaggeration to say that his sketch of Westminster Abbey and of Stratford induced thousands of Americans to visit those hallowed spots.

Irving's productions after those first-fruits of his pen "Bracebridge Hall," 1822; "Tales of a Traveller," 1824; "Life and Voyages of Columbus," 1828; "The Conquest of Granada," 1829; "The Companions of Columbus," 1831; "The Alhambra," 1832; "The Life of Oliver Goldsmith," 1849; "Mahomet and His Successors,' 1850; "The Life of George Washington,” 18551859 were intended almost exclusively for American readers. They were in part scholarly efforts in the style of the Edinburgh Review; they were certainly not European literature. He revealed to those of his countrymen to whom the fruits of research were not otherwise accessible the picturesque splendor of the Mohammedan world-orientalists and poets had done that for Europe many decades before.

3. James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) is appreciated among us to-day chiefly by boys and girls, but about eighty years ago, and for a long time after, he was the most widely read author in the world. The inventor of the elec

tric telegraph, Samuel F. B. Morse, said in the year 1833: "In every city of Europe that I visited, the works of Cooper were conspicuously placed in the windows of every bookshop. They are published, as soon as he produces them, in thirty-four different places in Europe. They have been seen by American travellers in the languages of Turkey and Persia, in Constantinople, in Egypt, at Jerusalem, at Ispahan.”*

Cooper, who had passed his thirtieth year before he began to write, bequeathed to posterity a library of sixty-seven volumes; from the merciless winnower, Time, only five have issued as wheat, the Leatherstocking Tales: "The Pioneers, or the Sources of the Susquehanna," 1823; "The Last of the Mohicans," 1826; "The Prairie, a Tale," 1827; "The Pathfinder, or the Inland Sea," 1840; "The Deerslayer, or the First War Path," 1841.

The chronology of these works demands the sequence given above; we find thus that the hero of the five novels, the hunter Natty Bumppo, was first pictured by Cooper in the years of his

*Th. Stanton, "A Manual of American Literature," 1909.

†Besides these the books that are read are “The Spy,” 1821, and "The Pilot," 1823. The first-named novel has the War of Independence as its background; the second, in which Cooper turns to account his recollections of his service in the navy, portrays the adventures of John Paul Jones.

manhood and old age, until, through the insatiability of his readers, the successful author conceived the idea of adding a narrative of his youth. If one wishes to enjoy the whole prose poem, however, unconcernedly like a child, and to follow the hero from his beginnings to the close of his life, he must observe a different order in reading them: (1) "The Deerslayer," (2) "The Last of the Mohicans," (3) "The Pathfinder," (4) "The Pioneers," (5) "The Prairie."

It is not very difficult to understand the immense popularity of the Leatherstocking Tales and the fame of the writer in the first half of the nineteenth century. First and foremost, the longing for the dreamed-of golden age of primitive life met him halfway. The civilized world was not yet so far removed from the sentimental visions of Rousseau; sensitive souls still wept over Paul and Virginia; and even Chateaubriand's imitations elicited boundless admiration. For that generation, keyed to the glad tidings of a return to primitiveness, Natty Bumppo, a hunter living among the redskins, averse to all polish but imbued with the noblest humanity, was the embodiment of their ideal of a man who owes all to nature, nothing to civilization. Cooper, who was only moder

ately gifted with the faculty of imaginative reproduction, endowed the hero of the Leatherstocking Tales very richly from the treasurehouse of his own spiritual life; it is owing to this that of all Cooper's characters, Natty Bumppo most strongly produces the illusion of reality.

Cooper himself, as a member of a family of distinction, was deeply imbued with the prejudices of the modern social order. Observe, for example, how he prepares the reader, how he cajoles him, before he ventures to enlist his sympathies for the children of nature. He introduces the good-natured giant of the primeval forest, Henry March, with the apology that though, of course, not free from roughness such as a conflict with savage nature naturally produces, the grandeur of so splendid a stature prevented the man from appearing altogether "common"—that is, the man of the people may be forgiven his uncorrupted soul on account of his physical perfection.

But in his inmost being Cooper was a child of nature, an only half-tamed denizen of the woods a survival in the midst of the conventions of a feeble time. His resistance to the constraint of the prevailing manners manifested itself even in his schooldays; and his innumer

able feuds with the press and the public show that he could never completely adapt himself to the artificial social order-that is to say, he could never quite suppress his strong individuality for the sake of peace.

When a young fellow he was expelled from college; later, at the height of his fame, he incurred the displeasure of young America and then of the entire nation. And why? He had travelled in Europe and by his fearless criticism had attracted unfavorable attention. Upon his return home he wrote a work in which he held up the mirror to his countrymen. Whereupon all the papers and politicians fell upon him, and he endured ten years of the bitterest obloquy. This could only happen to a man who cannot accommodate himself to circumstances, who does not allow his convictions to be circumscribed, who must live his life in his own way. Hence his comprehension not only of Natty Bumppo, but likewise of the Indians. In comparison with the unquestioning selfrighteousness which so generally characterizes the whites, Cooper's attitude toward the colored races is that of an unprejudiced philosopher. Leatherstocking, through whose lips Cooper expresses his views on the race question, says: