The young women are far from being lay figures. They have beauty, intelligence, courage, even audacity. That they are too perfect in feature, form, manner, was a defect common to all fiction of the time; the art of making a heroine of a plain woman was in its infancy. Cooper, who could describe a girl, had always a deal of trouble to make her talk. Did he never listen to the conversation of those interesting creatures known, in the parlance of his day, as ‘females’? Would Alice Dunscombe, meeting her lover after a separation of six years, have used the phrases Cooper put into her lips? All these young women might with justice have complained that the speaking parts assigned them were not representative. But they were at the author’s mercy and did as they were told. Cooper’s principal biographer, to whom we are all vastly indebted, says that ‘the female characters of his earlier novels are never able to do anything successfully but faint.’ This is unfair. Katherine Plowden, a brunette beauty, whom Professor Lounsbury has allowed himself to forget, goes habited _en garçon_ to seek her lover, and does not faint when she finds him, only laughs like the gay Rosalind she is. The story of ‘Mr. Gray the pilot’ is good, but _The Red Rover_ is better. Cooper gave the public something new in pirates. The old-fashioned corsair, in theatrical phrase, looked his part. He swore horribly, was awful to behold, black-whiskered, visibly blood-stained, a walking stand of arms, like the monsters described in Esquemeling’s _Buccaneers of America_. Unlike L’Olonnois, of evil memory, the captain of the ‘Dolphin’ is almost a Brummell; his cabin is a boudoir, and he has the wit to eschew the old-fashioned device of skull and cross-bones. One is inclined, however, to laugh when the pirate ‘throws his form on a divan’ and bids music discourse. The Rover was somewhat given to posing, and in moments of deep thought wore a ‘look of faded marble.’ There is nothing fantastic in Wilder, the young captain, and nothing to be desired in his handling of the ‘Royal Caroline.’ The description of the flight before the strange cruiser is a splendidly nervous piece of writing. From the moment when the Bristol trader disentangles herself from the slaver’s side in the harbor of Newport until she becomes a wreck on the high seas and the diabolical pursuer passes like a hurricane, the interest is cumulative. The book has its quota of garrulous old salts, some of whom talk too much, others not enough. ‘Mister Nightingale’ promises well, but has little of value to say after his discourse anent the quantity of sail a ship may carry in a white squall off the coast of Guinea. The reader will find amusement in the other characters, notably Fid and that strange being, Scipio Africanus.