Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[92] to hazard a guess as to which tribunal was likely to be the tribunal of the future.

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Some popular novels.

As marked in its triumph over European criticism, though as stormy as Irving's was peaceful, was the career of James Fenimore Cooper. He was not, of course, our earliest novelist, inasmuch as Charles Brockden Brown had preceded him and a series of minor works of fiction had intervened; novels commonly of small size but of wide circulation and written usually by women. First of these was The coquette, or the history of Eliza Wharton, a novel founded on fact by a lady of Massachusetts, this being published in Boston in 1797. It was the work of Hannah Webster of Boston, who married the Rev. John Foster, D. D., and who also wrote The Lessons of a Preceptress in 1]798, perhaps to excuse herself for the daring deed of writing fiction about a coquette. Many editions of her novel were published, the thirteenth appearing so lately as 1833, in Boston.

Another book of similar popularity was Charlotte Temple, a tale of truth, by Mrs. Rowson of the New Theatre, Philadelphia, 1794. It was a little book containing