Waverley Novels influenced Leatherstocking Tales (2)

Waverley invented the historical novel as a commercial form in 1814, and Cooper is the most direct of its inheritors: he was called the American Scott in his own lifetime and did not object to it. The borrowed machinery is specific. A young man of the settled world is taken into an older one and has to learn it; the older culture is rendered with sympathy and is shown to be finished; history is carried by invented minor characters while the famous figures pass through; and the landscape is described at a length that asserts the place is a subject in its own right. Scott's Highlanders after the 'Forty-five and Cooper's Delaware in the Seven Years' War occupy the same structural position, and both writers were criticised in the same terms for it.