Page 51 Advertisements Column 1

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXIX, Issue 25, 21 December 1907, Page 51

Naggus: 1 have read your (speech, Horus; and, to tell the truth, I don’t like its physiognomy. Borus: Its physiognomy! What do you mean? Naggus: Its “I’s” are too elose together. In the “Atlantic Monthly” appears an interesting and most appreciative paper on Fenimore Cooper, by Professor Brander Matthews. As to the debt of other authors to Cooper, and their appreciation of him, Professor Matthews says:—“lf we may judge an author by the variety of those he has stimulated, Cooper must take high rank. He has stirred a host of other writers, often men who pursued wholly different artistic ideals. He drew from Balzac “roars of pleasure and admiration”; and Dumas avowedly imitated him in the “Mohicans of Paris.” Mr. Kipling once remarked to me, after a re-reading of Cooper, that he had come across scene after scene which he knew already in the narratives of later novelists, and that a host of later writers had been going to Cooper’s works as to a storehouse of striking situations where they could help themselves, so fertile in invention was the earlier American author. Even Thackeray did not disdain to borrow from him the hint of one of his noblest chapters; and Poe may have taken over the suggestion of the method of his marvellously acute M. Dupin from the skill with which Cooper’s redskins followed a trail blind to eyes less acute than theirs. Sainte-Beuve declared (adds Professor Matthews) that Cooper possessed that “creative faculty which brings into the world new characters. and by virtue of which Rabelais produced Panurgo. Ix> Sage Gil Blas, and Richardson Pamela.” There can be no higher praise than this.”