"From woman's eyes this doctrine I derive: They sparkle still the right promethean fire; They are the books, the arts, the academes, That show, contain, and nourish all the world; Else, none at all in aught proves excellent."
Grayson Griffith is a religious story. We approve of the moral, as a matter of course--who will not? But we do not come quite up to the writer's standard of perfection, for we candidly confess we cannot see the germs of perdition in a social game of whist; and while we detest gambling and gamblers, the proscription of amusements innocent in themselves, because some remote analogy may be traced between them and practices at once immoral and every way destructive, seems to us irreconcileable with sound logic or true philosophy. The attempt to trace the vices of men to early habitudes is not always successful, as the power of good or evil impressions over the mind and habits, is essentially modified by the character of each individual. Besides, accident often determines the destinies of men, so far as we can see, in very spite of every previous tendency. We doubt, for instance, whether the fascinations of the faro-table would not have been as great to Grayson if he had never seen a card, as they proved to be, as related in the story. But we are getting into the discussion of a question which requires more time and space than we have to spare.
The "Letter on the United States, by a _Young Scotchman_," is generally amusing; but some of the passages in it strike us with surprise. He tells us that, "although the Americans are great novel readers, there is too much matter-of-fact about them; they are too calculating and money-making [this from a Scotchman!] to serve the purposes of the novelist. They form but indifferent heroes and heroines of romance, and hence Cooper is obliged to resort to the sea to rake up pirates and smugglers, or to go back to the revolution or the early settlement of his country to find characters and incidents calculated to give verisimilitude and interest to his tales." This seems to us hasty and jejune criticism. Cooper was not, as we know, "_obliged_" to rake up pirates and smugglers; but as this writer has told us in the ninth number of the Messenger, "He (Cooper) had been for some years an officer in the American Navy, where he acquired a knowledge of all the minutiæ of nautical life, which was of great service to him in the composition of some of his tales. These are justly considered as his best"--and he might have added, are written with power peculiar to Cooper, of whom it may truly be said: