wn the room
furiously until the chapter was finished. Then half ashamed of the
excitement into which he had been betrayed, he avenged himself just as
if he were a professional reviewer by indulging in a bit of special
criticism: "It's all very well," he burst out, "but you have let your
jib stand too long, my fine fellow." For once Cooper heeded advice. "I
blew it out of the bolt-rope," said he, "in pure spite;" and blown out
of the bolt-rope the jib appears in the tale.

He now felt reasonably confident of success, and any doubt that might
have lingered in his mind was at once swept away by the favorable
reception the work met when it came out. Its publication was for (p. 047)
a while delayed. Early in the summer of 1823 the first volume had been
finished and a portion of the second, but any further progress was checked
for the time by an affliction that then befell the author. On the 5th of
August his youngest child, Fenimore, then little less than two years old,
died at the family residence in Beach Street, New York, and this calamity
was followed by illness of his own. "The Pilot," in consequence, though
bearing the date of 1823, was not actually furnished to the trade until
the 7th of January, 1824. Its success, both in this country and in
Europe, was instantaneous. Far-sighted men saw at once that a new
realm had been added to the domain of fiction. "The Pilot" is indeed
not only the first of Cooper's sea-stories in point of time, but if we
regard exclusively the excellence of detached scenes, it may perhaps
be justly styled the best of them all. At any rate its place in the
highest rank of this species of fiction cannot be disputed, and in
spite of the multitude of similar works that have followed in its wake
and which have had their seasons of temporary popularity, its hold
upon the public has never been lost.

Cooper was without question exceptionally fortunate in the materials
with which he had to deal. He was never under the necessity of getting
up with infinite toil what the modern novelist terms his local coloring.
This existed for him ready made. He had only to call to mind the men he
had himself met, the hazards he had run, the life he had lived, to be
furnished with all the incidents and scenes and characters that were
capable of being wrought into romance. His descriptions both of forest
and of sea have all that vividness and reality which cannot well be given
save by him who has threaded at will eve