ABSTRACT
William Howard Gardiner wrote extensively for the North American Review, often arguing vigorously that America was a sufficiently interesting and productive field for distinctive fiction. The characters of fiction should be descriptive of classes, and not of individuals, or they will seem to want the touch of nature, and a consciousness of their truth. The James Fenimore Cooper's Spy of the Neutral Ground is not the production of an ordinary mind, and one will not presume to set limits to that capacity of improvement, which the author of Precaution has evinced in the second attempt. He has the high praise, and will have, one may add, the future glory, of having struck into a new path— of having opened a mine of exhaustless wealth— in a word, he has laid the foundations of American romance, and is really the first who has deserved the appellation of a distinguished American novel writer.
