In estimating novelists by the number and variety of characters with which they have enriched the repertory of fiction, Cooper’s place, if not the highest, is very high.  The fruitfulness of his genius in this regard is kindred to its fertility in the invention of incidents.  We can pardon in a portrait-gallery of such extent here and there an ill-drawn figure or a face wanting in expression.  With the exception of Scott, and perhaps of Dickens, what writer of prose fiction has created a greater number of characters such as stamp themselves upon the memory so that an allusion to them is well understood in cultivated society?  Fielding has drawn country squires, and Smollett has drawn sailors; but neither has intruded upon the domain of the other, nor could he have made the attempt without failure.  Some of our living novelists have a limited list of characters; they have half a dozen types which we recognize as inevitably as we do the face and voice of an actor in the king, the lover, the priest, or the bandit:  but Cooper is not a mere mannerist, perpetually copying from himself.  His range is very wide:  it includes white men, red men, and black men,—­sailors, hunters, and soldiers,—­lawyers, doctors, and clergymen,—­past generations and present,—­Europeans and Americans,—­civilized and savage life.  All his delineations are not successful; some are even unsuccessful:  but the aberrations of his genius must be viewed in connection with the extent of the orbit through which it moves.  The courage which led him to expose himself to so many risks of failure is itself a proof of conscious power.

Cooper’s style has not the ease, grace, and various power of Scott’s,—­or the racy, idiomatic character of Thackeray’s,—­or the exquisite purity and transparency of Hawthorne’s:  but it is a manly, energetic style, in which we are sure to find good words, if not the best.  It has certain wants, but it has no marked defects; if it does not always command admiration, it never offends.  It has not the highest finish; it sometimes betrays carelessness:  but it is the natural garb in which a vigorous mind clothes its conceptions.  It is the style of a man who writes from a full mind, without thinking of what he is going to say; and this is in itself a certain kind of merit.  His descriptive powers are of a high order.  His love of Nature was strong; and, as is generally the case with intellectual men, it rather increased than diminished as he grew older.  It was not the meditative and self-conscious love of a sensitive spirit, that seeks in communion with the outward world a relief from the burdens and struggles of humanity, but the hearty enjoyment of a thoroughly healthy nature, the schoolboy’s sense of a holiday dwelling in a manly breast.  His finest passages are those in which he presents the energies and capacities of humanity in combination with striking or beautiful scenes in Nature.  His genius, which sometimes moves with “compulsion and laborious flight” when dealing with artificial