curious illustration of a word combining in itself both these errors is _wists_, a verb, in the third person, singular. If this be anything it should be _wist_, the preterite of _wot_, and should have accordingly the meaning "knew." Cooper uses it in fact as a present with the (p. 274) sense of "wishes." Far worse than occasional errors in the use of words are errors of construction. His sentences are sometimes involved in the most hopeless way, and the efforts of grammar to untie the knot by any means known to it serve only to make conspicuous its own helplessness. All this is, in itself, of slight importance when set off against positive merits. But it is constantly forced upon the reader's attention by the fact that Cooper himself was exceedingly critical on points of speech. He was perpetually going out of his way to impart bits of information about words and their uses, and it is rare that he blunders into correct statement or right inference. He often, indeed, in these matters carried ignorance of what he was talking about, and confidence in his own knowledge of it to the extremest verge of the possible. He sometimes mistook dialectic or antiquated English for classical, and laboriously corrected the latter by putting the former in parentheses by its side. In orthography and pronunciation he had never got beyond that puerile conception which fancies it a most creditable feature in a word that its sound shall not be suggested by anything in its spelling. In the case of proper names this was more than creditable; it was aristocratic. So in "The Crater" great care is taken to tell us that the hero's name, though written Woolston, was pronounced Wooster; and that he so continued to sound it in spite of a miserable Yankee pedagogue who tried hard to persuade him to follow the spelling. So, again, in "The Ways of the Hour" we are sedulously informed that Wilmeter is to be pronounced Wilmington. But absurdities like these belonged not so much to Cooper as to the good old times of gentlemanly ignorance in (p. 275) which he lived. In his etymological vagaries, however, he sometimes left his age far behind. In "The Oak Openings" he enters upon the discussion of the word "shanty." He finds the best explanation of its origin is to suppose it a corruption of _chiente_, a word which he again supposed might exist in Canadian French, and provided it existed there, he further supposed that in that dialect it might mean "dog-kennel." The student of language, much hardened to this sort of work on the part of men of letters, can read with resignation "this plausible derivation," as it is styled. Cooper, however, not content with the simple glory of originating it, actually uses throughout the whole work _chiente_ instead of "shanty." This rivals, if it does not outdo, the linguistic excesses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.