America has had among her representatives of the irritable race of writers many who have shown far more ability to get on pleasantly with their fellows than Cooper. She has had several gifted with higher spiritual insight than he, with broader and juster views of life, with finer ideals of literary art, and, above all, with far greater delicacy of taste. But she counts on the scanty roll of her men of letters the name of no one who acted from purer patriotism or loftier principle. She finds among them all no manlier nature, and no more heroic soul. Mr. W. C. Brownell prepared for the Iroquois Edition of Cooper’s Works a critical introduction which may safely be accepted as the most just, most delicate, and most comprehensive analysis of the man and of his work. Mr. Brownell writes: There is a quality in Cooper’s romance, however, that gives it as romance an almost unique distinction. I mean its solid and substantial alliance with reality. It is thoroughly romantic, and yet--very likely owing to his imaginative deficiency, if anything can be so owing--it produces, for romance, an almost unequalled illusion of life itself.... Cooper’s ... work is in no sense a _jardin des plantes_; it is like the woods and sea that mainly form its subject and substance. Only critical myopia can be blind to the magnificent forest, with its pioneer clearings, its fringe of “settlements,” its wood-embosomed lakes, its neighbouring prairie on the one side, and on the other the distant ocean with the cities of its farther shore--the splendid panorama of man, of nature, and of human life unrolled for us by this large intelligence and noble imagination, this manly and patriotic American representative in the literary parliament of the world. _The Elder Dana._--Richard Henry Dana (1787-1879), lawyer, politician, poet, critic, and novelist, was one of the group of Boston writers that laid the foundations of New England literature. His tales, “Tom Thornton” and “Paul Felton,” are romantic stories of villainy and insanity, and give evidence of the influence of Brockden Brown. The narrative has at times an impetuous sweep that hurries the reader along in spite of himself; and the characterisation is wrought with powerful strokes. A collective edition of his “Poems and Prose Writings” appeared in 1833.