or trapper whose life was passed in the midst of the treacherous and truculent savages, and whose safety depended upon his possession of senses of eye and ear as acute as those of his vigilant and ubiquitous foes, Fenimore Cooper saw something of men who had played more or less distinguished parts in the great game of life. When the general peace was signed in 1815, the United States, a young country of magnificent distances and boundless resources, was looked upon as a haven of refuge to mariners storm-tossed and wrecked upon the ocean of European wars. It was known that about the year 1815, and long after, everything connected with England was regarded with peculiar aversion in the young Republic. The small community by which the hamlet of Cooperstown was inhabited presented rare chances for studying character to a young and observant boy. The village grocer was an ex-Governor of Martinique. The only commission agent in the place had been a captain in the British army. The dancing master who hoped to get his bread by teaching American youths and damsels how to step the minuet as it was performed at the Tuilleries, had been "tambour major" in a French regiment. The village school at which Fenimore Cooper received his first instruction was under the care of a pedagogue whose fees were chiefly paid in apples and onions. We read with little surprise that, neither at Cooperstown nor at Yale College, to which as a boy of fourteen Fenimore Cooper was transferred, had he any taste for books. His life was chiefly passed in dreamy walks along the edges of Newhaven Harbor, and there he picked up a taste for the sea, which, in 1806, when he was seventeen years old, his father permitted him to indulge. It enabled him, at any rate, to write "The Pilot," which has been pronounced by many competent judges to be the best sea novel in the English language, and also in 1839 to compile a "History of the Navy of the United States," which is not likely soon to fall out of favor with its author's compatriots from any lack of patriotic fervor, or on account of its outspoken expressions of detestation for Great Britain.

What are the qualities which have made Fenimore Cooper one of the most popular novelists in the world, and will, doubtless, lead to a continued demand for "The Last of the Mohicans," "The Prairie," the "Spy," and "The Pathfinder," for many generations to come? The answer is probably that, like Sir Walter Scott, Fenimore Cooper cared little for grace or beauty of language, or even for strict grammatical accuracy, so long as his books teemed with strong situations, which, as he expressed it, "described themselves." In Sir Walter's novels the reader comes again and again upon scenes created by the strong power of imagination, or at least of adaptation, with which "The Wizard of the North" was gifted, in which there is no need for the analytical dissection and minute elaboration of detail in which Honoré de Balzac and George Eliot took such delight. With Fenimore Cooper the case was the same, except that he had the additional advantage over Sir Walter of taking for his subjects the wild life of the red Indian savages, with all its romantic surroundings. The heroes both of the English and the American novelists are not invertebrate, like those of the analytical school of modern fiction writers, but strong men. The result is, that no youth can ever read Fenimore Cooper's best romances without having them ineffaceably stamped upon his mind. There are novels by the hands of great masters of the art of fiction-writing which are read, enjoyed, and forgotten. To produce a great effect upon the average mind it is necessary, however, that a novelist should thoroughly understand what Sir Walter Scott calls "the bowwow business." Most of our living writers, conscious that every conceivable situation, every variety of plot, has long ago been exhausted, attempt to attract and interest their readers by beauty of diction and minuteness of detail. Walter Scott and Fenimore Cooper employed more vigorous methods, and, although the former has been in his grave for more than half a century, and the latter for more than a generation, their names will be remembered and their works read so long as the English tongue is spoken.

CHARLES DICKENS.

M

ODERN literature has no name with a wider fame on its muster-roll than that of Charles Dickens. He was born at Landport, near Portsea, on the 7th of February, 1812. His father, John Dickens, was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. In the letters of Charles Dickens to his good and trusty friend and judicious literary adviser, John Forster, we have sufficient of the character of the elder Dickens laid bare to show us what manner of man he was; and some of his traits were avowedly reproduced in the inimitable "Wilkins Micawber" of "David Copperfield." A kindly, good-hearted man, with the gift that Goldsmith called "a knack of hoping," and which his son aptly characterized as a tendency to "wait for something to turn up;" easy in temper, somewhat grandiloquent in language, rejoicing in high-sounding phrases, and cheerfully, if not very judiciously, drifting onward through difficulties and straitened means, without the power of raising himself out of the slough of despond into which his affairs were gradually sinking. "I know my father to be as kindhearted and generous a man as ever lived in the world," is Dickens' emphatic testimony to his worth. "Everything I can remember of his conduct to his wife or children, or friends, in sickness or affliction, is beyond all praise. By me, as a sick child, he has watched night and day unweariedly. He never undertook any business, charge, or trust that he did not zealously, conscientiously, punctually, honorably discharge." And yet this good, kindly man was Wilkins Micawber, unable to keep his family together, unable to see the paramount impor