the literature of the language.  The manners, habits, and costumes of England have greatly changed during the last hundred years; but Richardson and Fielding are still read.  We must expect corresponding changes in this country during the next century; but we may confidently predict that in the year 1962 young and impressible hearts will be saddened at the fate of Uncas and Cora, and exult when Captain Munson’s frigate escapes from the shoals.

A few pages back we spoke of Cooper’s want of skill in the structure of his plots, and his too frequent recurrence to improbable incidents to help on the course of his stories.  But most readers care little about this defect, provided the writer betrays no poverty of invention, and succeeds in making his narratives interesting.  Herein Cooper never lays himself open to that instinctive and unconscious criticism, which is the only kind an author need dread, because from it there is no appeal.  It is bad to have a play hissed down, but it is worse to have it yawned down.  But over Cooper’s pages his readers never yawn.  They never break down in the middle of one of his stories.  The fortunes of his characters are followed with breathless and accumulating interest to the end.  In vain does the dinner-bell sound, or the clock strike the hour of bed-time:  the book cannot be laid down till we know whether Elizabeth Temple is to get out of the woods without being burned alive, or solve the mystery that hangs over the life of Jacopo Frontoni.  He has in ample measure that 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.