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By James Fenimore Cooper

Condensation by CYRUS TOWNSEND BRADY SOME time since an American publisher invited a group of men, including among others Roosevelt, Barnes, Spears, Connolly, and the writer, to select the greatest six romances of the sea. The Two Admirals was the one of Cooper's sea tales included by a unanimous vote.

Well does the book deserve its selection, for it is without question the greatest of all the novels of the sea, all of which I have read and not a few of which I have written.

It has more of the best of Cooper, and less of his worst, than any of his naval or other romances. No writer was ever more at home on a ship's deck than Cooper-not even Marryat. And all his knowledge of the great deep, the way of ships therein, the habits and customs of sailors, has been utilized in full measure in this immortal story. It rings true alike to seamen and landsmen. There is a subsidiary story concerning the love-affairs of a gallant young sea officer, Sir Wycherly Wychecombe, and Mildred Dutton-Bluewater, a damsel as lovely, as delicate, and as inane as Cooper at his worst could describe. Whenever she appeared she was either suffused with blushes or bursting into tears. On one occasion she wept steadily for above one half-hour! The supposed daughter of a drunken, retired officer and a woman of the middle class, Mildred turns out to be the lawful niece of one of the two admirals, just in time to soothe his dying hours, while her husband, a Virginian, turns up in the nick of time with the papers in his hands to prove his succession to the ancient title and lands of Wychecombe. All of which is excessively tiresome.

Fortunately the greater part of the book is taken up with the doings of the two admirals. The puerile, pre-mid-Victorian romance will easily be forgotten, but the remainder will richly repay the reader.