literature remains secure. To have written our first historical
novel, "The Spy," our first sea-story, "The Pilot," and to have
created the Leather-Stocking series, is glory enough. In his
perception of masculine character, Cooper ranks with Fielding.
His sailors, his scouts and spies, his good and bad Indians, are
as veritable human figures as Squire Western. Long Tom Coffin,
Harvey Birch, Hawk-Eye, and Chingachgook are physically and
morally true to life itself. Read the Leather-Stocking books in
the order of the events described, beginning with "The
Deerslayer," then "The Last of the Mohicans," "The Pathfinder,"
"The Pioneers", and ending with the vast darkening horizon of
"The Prairie" and the death of the trapper, and one will feel how
natural and inevitable are the fates of the personages and the
alterations in the life of the frontier. These books vary in
their poetic quality and in the degree of their realism, but to
watch the evolution of the leading figure is to see human life in
its actual texture.

Clever persons and pedantic persons have united to find fault
with certain elements of Cooper's art. Mark Twain, in one of his
least inspired moments, selected Cooper's novels for attack.
Every grammar school teacher is ready to point out that his style
is often prolix and his sentences are sometimes ungrammatical.
Amateurs even criticize Cooper's seamanship, although it seemed
impeccable to Admiral Mahan. No doubt one must admit the
"helplessness, propriety, and incapacity" of most of Cooper's
women, and the dreadfulness of his bores, particularly the
Scotchmen, the doctors, and the naturalists. Like Sir Walter,
Cooper seems to have taken but little pains in the deliberate
planning of his plots. Frequently he accepts a ready-made formula