It is by his early tales of wilderness and ocean life that he will survive.  There his genius is fresh, vigorous, natural—­uncramped by restraints, undeformed by excrescences, uninterrupted by crotchets, such as injured its aftergrowth—­the swaddling-clothes of its second childhood.  If we have spoken freely—­we hope not flippantly—­of these feeblenesses, it is because the renown of Cooper is too tenaciously and permanently rooted to be ‘radically’ affected thereby, however they may diminish the symmetry and dim the verdure of blossom and branch.  His magnificent panoramas of prairie solitude, his billowy expanses of the ‘many-voiced sea,’ his artistically-grouped figures of red-skins and trappers, sealers and squatters, are among the things which Anglo-Saxon literature in either hemisphere will not willingly let die.  By these he is, and long will be, known and read of all men.  And if ever Mr Macaulay’s New Zealander should ponder over the ruins of Broadway, as well as of St Paul’s, he will probably carry in his pocket one of those romances which tell how the Last of the Mohicans came to his end, and which illustrate the closing destinies of tribes which shall then have disappeared before the chill advance of the Pale Face.

WHY DOES THE PENDULUM SWING?

The attention of the visitor to the recent Exhibition in Hyde Park was arrested, as he advanced westwards down the central promenade of the building, by a large clock busily at work marking off the seconds of passing time.  That piece of mechanism had a remarkably independent and honest look of its own.  The inmost recesses of its breast were freely bared to the inspection of every passer-by.  As if aware of the importance of the work intrusted to its care, it went on telling, in the midst of the ever-changing and bustling crowd, with a bold and unhesitating click, the simple fact it knew; and that there might be no mistake, it registered what it told in palpable signs transmitted through the features of its own stolid face.  Mr Dent’s great clock was by no means the least distinguished object in the collection of the world’s notabilities.

But there was one thing which nearly concerned that industrious and trusty monitor that he surely could not have known, or his quiet countenance would have shewn traces of perturbation.  He was doing Exhibition work, but he was not keeping Exhibition time.  The wonderful building in which he had taken up his temporary residence was, in fact, of too cosmopolitan a nature to have a time of its own.  Its entire length measured off very nearly 1-42,000th part of the circle of terrestrial latitude along which it stretched.  The meridian of the Liverpool Model was close upon thirty seconds of space farther west than the meridian of the Greek Slave.  Imagine the surface of Hyde Park to have been marked off, before Messrs Fox and Henderson’s workmen commenced their labours, by lines running north and south at