[38] Roundabout Papers.
[39] Erskine, pp. 80–81. This view is suggested by Cooper’s own note to his text, Riverside ed., p. 4.
[40] Erskine, p. 81. “A beautiful conception of old-world grace and courtliness, which Cooper must have drawn with affection,” Erskine remarks, “yet with all of Montcalm’s adroitness, his management of the Indians and his tact in treating with a conquered foe—the reader is made to feel the moral slipperiness which the hearty Englishman resents with a national distrust of French traditional perfidy.”
[41] Riverside ed. Last of the Mohicans, pp. 211–12. Cooper’s only comment that I can find on the relation of the sister muses.
[42] Dwight, Timothy. Travels in New England and New York (1821), III, 362–376. After stating that Montcalm made no reasonable effort to check the Indians, he emphasizes the timidity and imbecility of Webb who lay at Fort Edward with 6,000 men, doing nothing. Dwight narrates as from Captain Noble, who was present, that when Sir William Johnson would gather volunteers from Webb’s garrison to proceed to Munroe’s assistance, Webb forbade it. Cooper’s rendering of the massacre is sharply criticized by Martin in his Montcalm en Canada, chaps. 4 and 5. Cf. also Rameau, La France aux Colonies, II, p. 306; N. H. Prov. Papers, VI, 604, 605, and Stone, W. L. Life and Times of Johnson.
[43] Phillips, Mary E. James Fenimore Cooper (1912), p. 129.
[44] Introduction to Last of the Mohicans, p. xviii.
[45] The analogy which the spectacle afforded in Cooper’s mind to the conquest of Canaan, has not been commented upon, but a case can be made for it from the biblical names he for the first time applied to nearly all the characters; from the bee-hunter in his land of honey, the encounters with the “Ishmaelites of the plains,” the Sioux, the stampede of the buffalo furnishing the terror of wild beasts, and the problem of the Red Sea transformed into that of prairie fire, with Leatherstocking the Moses to show how to circumvent this difficulty.
[46] This was fitting for an old man. Thackeray pronounced Leatherstocking the greatest character created in Fiction since the Don Quixote of Cervantes and he thought the death scene in The Prairie, in which the old trapper said “Here!” as surpassing anything he had met in English literature. Phillips, 1621. Thackeray imitated this scene in Colonel Newcome’s “Adsum!”
[47] For a full discussion of these, see next chapter.