relieves them of his tremendous presence.  Mr. Gray, who stands for Paul Jones, is more carefully elaborated, but the result is far from satisfactory.  We are so constantly told of his calmness and abstraction, of his sudden starts and bursts of feeling, of his low voice, of his fits of musing, that the aggregate impression is that of affectation and self-consciousness, rather than of a simple, passionate, and heroic nature.  Mr. Gray does not seem to us at all like the rash, fiery, and dare-devil Scotchman of history.  His conduct and conversation, as recounted in the fifth chapter of the novel, are unnatural and improbable; and we cannot wonder that the first lieutenant did not know what to make of so melodramatic and sententious a gentleman, in the guise of a pilot.

Cooper, as we need hardly say, has drawn copiously upon Indian life and character for the materials of his novels; and among foreign nations much of his reputation is due to this fact.  Civilized men and women always take pleasure in reading about the manners and habits of savage life; and those in whom the shows of things are submitted to the desires of the mind delight to invest them with those ideal qualities which they do not find, or think they do not, in the artificial society around them.  Cooper had enjoyed no peculiar opportunities of studying by personal observation the characteristics of the Indian race, but he had undoubtedly read everything he could get hold of in illustration of the subject.  No one can question the vividness and animation of his sketches, or their brilliant tone of color.  He paints with a pencil dipped in the glow of our sunset skies and the crimson of our autumn maples.  Whenever he brings Indians upon the stage, we may be sure that scenes of thrilling interest are before us:  that rifles are to crack, tomahawks to gleam, and arrows to dart like sunbeams through the air; that a net of peril is to be drawn around his hero or heroine, from the meshes of which he or she is to be extricated by some unexpected combination of fortunate circumstances.  We expect a succession of startling incidents, and a rapid course of narrative without pauses or languid intervals.  We do not object to his idealizing his Indians:  this is the privilege of the novelist, time out of mind.  He may make them swift of foot, graceful in movement, and give them a form like the Apollo’s; he may put as much expression as he pleases into their black eyes; he may tessellate their speech as freely as he will with poetical and figurative expressions, drawn from the aspects of the external world:  for all this there is authority, and chapter and verse may be cited in support of it.  But we have a right to ask that he shall not transcend the bounds of reason and possibility, and represent his red men as moved by motives and guided by sentiments which are wholly inconsistent with the inexorable facts of the case.  We confess to being a little more than skeptical as to the Indian of poetry and romance:  like the