One or two generations ago, when every novel was in two volumes and serious works filled a shelf or so, our fathers or grandfathers may have read Chateaubriand. To-day the Americans who read French works usually confine themselves to writers earlier or later than he. Yet Chateaubriand was the first European author to make America the scene, and the Indian the subject of his romances. Moreover, he claims to have seen a large part of the territory east of the Mississippi; he asserts that he lived in the huts of the savages; and he describes the aborigines, flora, and fauna of the country from Niagara to Natchez.