The illustrations of M. Doré have given an additional value to this tale, so simple, so unsophisticated, yet blooming with all the wild luxuriance of nature. The artist has added his gifts to those of the poet; and those acquainted only with his ready and original powers as the delineator of farce and drollery, or of the exceptionally tragic and horrible, will find new cause for admiration in these quiet renderings of the primeval beauties of the American wild--its plains and forests, its still lagoons and roaring cataracts, its mountain slopes and deep defiles--all its aspects of rudest workmanship--and will welcome these efforts of his genius in the lovely realm of descriptive art, wedded as they are to the exquisite simplicity of this Indian romance. As in his other works, here may be noted the same surpassing fertility of resource, the same alertness of intellect and readiness and swiftness of touch; but there may also be found new proofs of his complete sympathy with all that is picturesque in forest beauty and his high intuitive perception of every possible phase of nature in her wildest caprice and most tender bloom. We append the following extracts from different prefaces to the author’s writings, as constituting what is explanatory of the story that follows: [From the Preface to the First Edition.] “I was still very young when I conceived the idea of composing an epic on ‘The Man of Nature,’ to depict the manners of savages, by uniting them with some well-known event. After the discovery of America, I saw no subject more interesting, especially to Frenchmen, than the massacre of the Natchez colony in Louisiana, in 1727. All the Indian tribes conspiring, after two centuries of oppression, for the restoration of liberty to the New World, appeared to me to offer a subject almost as attractive as the conquest of Mexico. I put some fragments of the work to paper; but I soon found that I was weak in local coloring, and that, if I wished to produce a picture of real resemblance, it became necessary for me, in imitation of Homer’s example, to visit the tribes I was desirous of describing.