translate English to German: In point of conception, each of his thirty three novels is possessed of a certain amount of merit; but hitches occur in all, so that every one of them is remarkable rather in its episodes than as a whole. Nothing can be more vividly told than the escape of the Yankee man-of-war through the shoals and from the English cruisers in The Pilot, but there are few things flatter in the range of fiction than the other incidents of the novel.
Mit Jonathan Swift und Daniel Defoe teilt er das Schicksal, "lediglich" als Jugendbuchautor zu gelten.