Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
Anyone interested in The Last of the Mohicans needs to read Mark Twain's essay, Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses. I read it at an impressionable age and it cured me of any desire to read his works.  |
I've never read Cooper and always felt
about it. But now that I have read Twain's essay, I don't think I'll be in a hurry to do so. This passage left me gobsmacked!
'In the Deerslayer story he lets Deerslayer talk the showiest kind of book-talk sometimes, and at other times the basest of base dialects. For instance, when some one asks him if he has a sweetheart, and if so, where she abides, this is his majestic answer:
"'She's in the forest-hanging from the boughs of the trees, in
a soft rain—in the dew on the open grass—the clouds that
float about in the blue heavens—the birds that sing in the
woods—the sweet springs where I slake my thirst—and in all
the other glorious gifts that come from God's Providence!'
And he preceded that, a little before, with this:
"'It consarns me as all things that touches a fri'nd consarns a
fri'nd.'" '
