A skilful construction of the story is a merit which the public taste no longer demands, and it is consequently fast becoming one of the lost arts.  The practice of publishing novels in successive numbers, so that one portion is printed before another is written, is undoubtedly one cause of this.  But English and American readers have not been accustomed to this excellence in the works of their best writers of fiction; and therefore they are not sensitive to the want of it.  This is certainly not one of Scott’s strong points.  Fielding’s “Tom Jones” is, in this respect, superior to any of the “Waverley Novels,” and without an equal, so far as we know, in English literature.  But, in sitting in judgment upon a writer of novels, we cannot waive an inquiry into his merits on this point.  Are his stories, simply as stories, well told?  Are his plots symmetrically constructed and harmoniously evolved?  Are his incidents probable? and do they all help on the catastrophe?  Does he reject all episodical matter which would clog the current of the narrative?  Do his novels have unity of action? or are they merely a series of sketches, strung together without any relation of cause and effect?  Cooper, tried by these rules, can certainly command no praise.  His plots are not carefully or skilfully constructed.  His incidents are not probable in themselves, nor do they succeed each other in a natural and dependent progression.  His characters get into scrapes from which the reasonable exercise of common faculties should have saved them; and they are rescued by incredible means and impossible instruments.  The needed man appears as unaccountably and mysteriously as if he had dropped from the clouds, or emerged from the sea, or crept up through a fissure in the earth.  The winding up of his stories is often effected by devices nearly as improbable as a violation of the laws of Nature.  His personages act without adequate motives; they rush into needless dangers; they trust their fate, with unsuspecting simplicity, to treacherous hands.

In works of fiction the skill of the writer is most conspicuously shown when the progress of the story is secured by natural and probable occurrences.  Many events take place in history and in common life which good taste rejects as inadmissible in a work of imagination.  Sudden death by disease or casualty is no very uncommon occurrence in real life; but it cannot be used in a novel to clear up a tangled web of circumstance, without betraying something of a poverty of invention in the writer.  He is the best artist who makes least use of incidents which lie out of the beaten path of observation and experience.  In constructive skill Cooper’s rank is not high; for all his novels are more or less open to the criticism that too frequent use is made in them of events very unlikely to have happened.  He leads his characters into such formidable perils that the chances are a million to one against their being rescued.  Such a run is made upon our credulity that the fund is soon exhausted, and the bank stops payment.