In calling Cooper the greatest of American novelists, we have not incurred much risk of contradiction.  Others may rival—­some surpass him—­in this or that province of the art of fiction; but as a master of the art in its broad aspect, he is facile princeps.  Brockden Brown treads a circle of mysterious power but mean circumference:  Washington Irving is admirable at a sketch, one of the liveliest and most graceful of essayists, and quite equal to the higher demands of imaginative prose—­witness his Rip Van Winkle and Sleepy Hollow—­but his forte is in miniature, and the orthodox dimensions of three volumes post-octavo would suit him almost as ill as would the Athenian vesture of Nick Bottom the spruce proportions of royal Oberon:  Haliburton is inimitable in his own line of things; his measure of wit and humour—­qualities unknown, or nearly so, to Cooper—­is ’pressed down, and shaken together, and running over;’ but his ‘mission’ and Cooper’s in the tale-telling art are wide as the poles asunder:  John Neale had once, particularly by his own appraisement, a high repute as the eccentric author of Logan and Seventy-six, but the repute, like the Seventy-six, is quite in the preterite tense now; and to review him and his works at this time of day would be suspiciously like a post-mortem examination, resulting possibly in a verdict of temporary insanity—­if not, indeed, of felo de se—­so wilful and wrongheaded were the vagaries of this ‘rough, egotistical Yankee,’ as he has been called:  Herman Melville is replete with graphic power, and riots in the exuberance of a fresh, racy style; but whether he can sustain the ‘burden and heat’ of a well-equipped and full-grown novel as deftly as the fragmentary autobiographies he loves to indite; remains to be seen:  Longfellow’s celebrity in fiction is limited to Hyperion and Kavanagh—­clever, but slight foundations for enduring popularity—­as irregular (the former at least) as Jean Paul’s nondescript stories, without the great German’s tumultuous genius:  Hawthorne is probably the most noteworthy of the rising authors of America, and indeed manifests a degree of psychological knowledge and far-sighted, deep-searching observation of which there are few traces or none in Cooper; but the real prowess of the author of The Scarlet Letter is, we apprehend, still undeveloped, and the harvest of his honours a thing of the future.  All these distinguished persons—­not to dwell on the kindred names of Bird, Kennedy, Ware, Paulding, Myers, Willis, Poe, Sedgwick, &c.—­must yield the palm to him who has attracted all the peoples and tongues of Europe[Footnote:  And, in one instance at least, of Asia also; for The Spy was translated into Persian!] to follow out the destiny of a Spy on the neutral ground, of a Pilot on the perilous coasts of a hostile race, of a Last of the Mohicans disappearing before the onward tramp of the white man.