VIEWED HISTORICALLY Cooper emerges from among his con-
temporaries as few of them could have realized he would
after a century. Every one of the great matters of his day--
the Settlement, the Revolution, the Frontier on land and
water--he touched with a masterly hand, and in essential
popularity he distanced all his rivals. It is of course mere co-
incidence that he was born in the year which produced The
Power of Sympathy and that when he died Uncle Tom's
Cabin was passing through its serial stage; yet the limits of
Cooper's life do mark almost exactly the first large period of
American fiction. Neal, Thompson, Paulding, Kennedy,
Simms--to mention no slighter figures--outlived him, but not,
as a current fashion, the type of romance which had flourished
under Cooper. Although by 1851 tales of adventure, as Cooper
and his school conceived adventure, had begun to seem anti-
quated, they had rendered a large service to the course of liter-
ature: they had removed the stigma, for the most part, from
the word novel. For the brutal scrapes of eighteenth-century
fiction the new romance, of Scott and Cooper, had substituted
deeds of chivalrous doings; it had supplanted the blunt flesh-
liness of Fielding and Smollett with a chaste and courtly love.
Familiar life, frequently shown in low settings, had been suc-
ceeded by remote life, generally idealized; historical detail had
been brought in to instruct readers who were being enter-
tained, not without some sense of guilt in their entertainment.
Cooper, like Scott, was more realistic than the Gothic ro-
mancers, more human than Godwin or Brown. The two most
common charges against the older fiction, that it pleased

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