Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/244

230 Fenimore Cooper is satirically "entreated," and his pseudonym as the American Scott shown to he very pseudonymous indeed: one character he is allowed to have created, and one that is guaranteed immortality beside Parson Adams and Doctor Primrose,—namely, Natty Bumpo; but all his other characters are said to he bad copies of this choice unique:all his other men-figures are dismissed as mere clothes upon sticks, and his women are cavalierly (no, uncavalierly) pronounced "all suppy as maples and flat as a prairie." A passing compliment is paid him, however, for his candid strictures on his countrymen's manners—which is made the occasion of a very pungent and animated remonstrance, on Mr. Lowell's part, against the imitative and plagiaristic propensities of his compatriots.

Honour is ascribed to Whittier for the honest warmth of his anti-slavery manifestoes—"who himself was so free he dared sing for the slave, when to look but a protest in silence was brave"—while he good-naturedly twitted with his confusion of pure inspiration with simple excitement, with his not-always-correct grammar and slip-shod rhymes. Dana is scolded for over-fastidiousness and consequent non-productiveness, when he might have written so much that would have been gladly read and proudly prized: he is pictured as "abstractedly loitering along, involved in a paulo-post future of song"—as a man "who is so well aware of how things should be done, that his own works displease him before they're begun"—and, in fine, as spending his whole life, "like the man in the fable, in learning to swim on his library-table." John Neal, on the other hand, is defined one who might have been a poet, had he not believed himself one all-ready made—who broke the strings of his lyre by striking too hard, and cracked a naturally fine voice by over-exertion—who has strength, but of the most irregular kind, and has used it to his own damage and discouragement. The author of "Twice-told Tales," again, is thus presented: