Since Scott’s day his pattern has approved itself to three generations of novelists; and it is not yet outworn. In France Victor Hugo and Alexander Dumas accepted it, each of them altering it at will, feeling free to adjust it to their own differing necessities. In Italy it was employed by Manzoni, in Poland by Sinckiewitz; and in Germany by a horde of uninspired story-tellers. In the United States it was at once borrowed by Cooper for the ‘Spy,’ the first American historical novel. Then Cooper, having proved its value, took the pattern which Scott had created for the telling of a story the action of which took place on land, and in the ‘Pilot’ made it serve for a story the action of which took place mainly on the sea,—perhaps a more striking originality than his contemporaneous employment of it for a series of tales the action of which took place in the forest. It is one of the most fortunate coincidences in the history of literature that Scott crossed the border and made a foray into English history at the very moment when Cooper was ready to write fiction about his own country; and it was almost equally unfortunate that Charles Brockden Brown was born too early to be able to avail himself of the pattern Scott and Cooper were to handle triumphantly. Brown died a score of years before the publication of ‘Ivanhoe.’ He left half-a-dozen novels of varying value, known only to devoted students of American fiction. He had great gifts; he had invention and imagination; he was a keen observer of human nature; he had a rich faculty of description. (In one of his books there is a portrayal of an epidemic of yellow fever in Philadelphia which almost challenges comparison with De Foe’s ‘Journal of the Plague Year’.) But “the state of the art” of fiction supplied Brown with no model appropriate to his endowment; and therefore he had to do the best he could with the unworthy pattern of the Gothic Romance of Horace Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe and of their belated followers, “Monk” Lewis and Godwin. If Brown had been a contemporary of Cooper, then the author of the ‘Last of the Mohicans’ might have had a worthy rival in his own country.