The scene opens on the day when the city of Granada is taken possession of by the Moors; and when Columbus, as a suitor for vessels to carry on his contemplated discoveries, is almost worn out with seven years of delay and disappointment. A young Spanish Grandee, called Luis Bobadilla, wild, adventurous, and fond of roving at sea, happening to be introduced to him in the crowd, is half persuaded to embark with the navigator on his dangerous voyage; an inclination which is strengthened to a firm resolve by his mistress, who, forbidden by Queen Isabella to marry so roving a nobleman, and thinking that such a voyage would be taken as a sort of expiation by her sovereign, advises, nay! commands him to embark with Columbus. The difficulties; the hopes; the final disappointment, and solitary departure of Columbus, are then faithfully described, as well as his sudden recall by order of the queen, and her determination to fit out the expedition from her own purse. This, however, we pass over, only remarking in passing, that the fiery pursuit of the young grandee through the Vega after the departing Columbus, and the scene where he overtakes the dejected navigator, are worthy of the best passages of the Pioneers, the Water-Witch, or the Last of the Mohicans. The young nobleman, consequently, disguised as a sailor, sails with Columbus out into the, as then thought, shoreless Atlantic. To describe this voyage was manifestly the sole object of the author in writing the work. Availing himself of the journal of the admiral, and mingling just enough of fiction with the incidents recorded there, to make it generally readable, Mr. Cooper has succeeded in producing the most popular, detailed, readable history of that voyage which has yet seen the light; and for this, we again repeat, he deserves much credit. But the very preponderance given to the narration of this part of the story, injures the work, _as a novel_, irremediably. It makes it, in short, “neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red-herring.” There is, indeed, an attempt to redeem the interest of the story by the introduction of an Indian princess, who, of course, falls in love with Bobadilla, and whom, of course, he does not marry. She, however, accompanies Luis home to Spain, and is the cause of much jealousy on the part of his mistress, of much anger on the part of the queen, and of just sufficient clap-trap in the last few chapters, to satisfy the conscience of your inveterate novel readers,—a class who think no novel is good unless it has a pretty strong dose of jealousy, reconcilement, and marriage, as a _finale_, much as Tony Lumpkin thought “that the inside of a letter was the cream of the correspondence.”