simple, and credulous, guileless himself, and suspecting no evil in others, with moderate intellectual powers, he commands our admiration and respect by his courage, his love of Nature, his skill in woodland lore, his unerring moral sense, his strong affections, and the veins of poetry that run through his rugged nature like seams of gold in quartz.  Long Tom Coffin may be described as Leatherstocking suffered a sea-change,—­with a harpoon instead of a rifle, and a pea-jacket instead of a hunting-shirt.  In both the same primitive elements may be discerned:  the same limited intellectual range combined with professional or technical skill; the same generous affections and unerring moral instincts; the same religious feeling, taking the form at times of fatalism or superstition.  Long Tom’s love of the sea is like Leatherstocking’s love of the woods; the former’s dislike of the land is like the latter’s dislike of the clearings.  Cooper himself, as we are told by his daughter, was less satisfied, in his last years, with Long Tom Coffin than most of his readers,—­and, of the two characters, considered that of Boltrope the better piece of workmanship.  We cannot assent to this comparative estimate; but we admit that Boltrope has not had full justice done to him in popular judgment.  It is but a slight sketch, but it is extremely well done.  His death is a bit of manly and genuine pathos; and in his conversations with the chaplain there is here and there a touch of true humor, which we value the more because humor was certainly not one of the author’s best gifts.

Antonio, the old fisherman, in “The Bravo,” is another very well drawn character, in which we can trace something of a family likeness to the hunter and sailor above mentioned.  The scene in which he is shrived by the Carmelite monk, in his boat, under the midnight moon, upon the Lagoons, is one of the finest we know of in the whole range of the literature of fiction, leaving upon the mind a lasting impression of solemn and pathetic beauty.  In “The Chainbearer,” the Yankee squatter, Thousandacres, is a repulsive figure, but drawn with a powerful pencil.  The energy of character, or rather of action, which is the result of a passionate love of money, is true to human nature.  The closing scenes of his rough and lawless life, in which his latent affection for his faithful wife throws a sunset gleam over his hard and selfish nature, and prevents it from being altogether hateful, are impressively told, and are touched with genuine tragic power.

On the other hand, Cooper generally fails when he undertakes to draw a character which requires for its successful execution a nice observation and a delicate hand.  His heroes and heroines are apt to abuse the privilege which such personages have enjoyed, time out of mind, of being insipid.  Nor can he catch and reproduce the easy grace and unconscious dignity of high-bred men and women.  His gentlemen, whether young or old, are apt to be stiff, priggish,