Cooper was fortunate in having been born with a vigorous constitution, and in having kept through life the blessing of robust health.  He never suffered from remorse of the stomach or protest of the brain; and his writings are those of a man who always digested his dinner and never had a headache.  His novels, like those of Scott, are full of the breeze and sunshine of health.  They breathe of manly tastes, active habits, sound sleep, a relish for simple pleasures, temperate enjoyments, and the retention in manhood of the fresh susceptibilities of youth.  His genius is thoroughly masculine.  He is deficient in acute perception, in delicate discrimination, in fine analysis, in the skill to seize and arrest exceptional peculiarities; but he has in large measure the power to present the broad characteristics of universal humanity.  It is to this power that he owes his wide popularity.  At this moment, in every public and circulating library in England or America, the novels of Cooper will be found to be in constant demand.  He wrote for the many, and not for the few; he hit the common mind between wind and water; a delicate and fastidious literary appetite may not be attracted to his productions, but the healthy taste of the natural man finds therein food alike convenient and savory.

In a manly, courageous, somewhat impulsive nature like Cooper’s we should expect to find prejudices; and he was a man of strong prejudices.  Among others, was an antipathy to the people of New England.  His characters, male and female, are frequently Yankees, but they are almost invariably caricatures; that is, they have all the unamiable characteristics and unattractive traits which are bestowed upon the people of New England by their ill-wishers.  Had he ever lived among them, with his quick powers of observation and essentially kindly judgment of men and life, he could not have failed to correct his misapprehensions, and to perceive that he had taken the reverse side of the tapestry for the face.

Cooper, with a very keen sense of injustice, conscious of inexhaustible power, full of vehement impulses, and not largely endowed with that safe quality called prudence, was a man likely to get involved in controversies.  It was his destiny, and he never could have avoided it, to be in opposition to the dominant public sentiment around him.  Had he been born in Russia, he could hardly have escaped a visit to Siberia; had he been born in Austria, he would have wasted some of his best years in Spielberg.  Under a despotic government he would have been a vehement Republican; in a Catholic country he would have been the most uncompromising of Protestants.  He had full faith in the institutions of his own country; and his large heart, hopeful temperament, and robust soul made him a Democrat; but his democracy had not the least tinge of radicalism.  He believed that man had a right to govern himself, and that he was capable of self-government; but government, the