tered upon the quiet life of a well-to-do
country gentleman.

For seven or eight years, he showed no desire nor aptitude to be
anything else. He had never written anything for publication, had never
felt any impulse to do so, and perhaps never would have felt such an
impulse but for an odd accident. Tossing aside a dull British novel,
one day, he remarked to his wife that he could easily write a better
story himself, and she laughingly dared him to try. The result was
"Precaution," than which no British novel could be duller. But Cooper,
finding the work of writing congenial, kept at it, and the next year saw
the publication of "The Spy," the first American novel worthy of the
name. By mere accident, Cooper had found his true vein, the story of
adventure, and his true field in the scenes with which he was himself
familiar. In Harvey Birch, the spy, he added to the world's gallery of
fiction the first of his three great characters, the other two being, of
course, Long Tom Coffin and Leatherstocking.

The book was an immediate success, and was followed by "The Pioneers"
and "The Pilot," both remarkable stories, the former visualizing for the
first time the life of the forest, the latter for the first time the
life of the sea. Let us not forget that Cooper was himself a pioneer and
blazed the trails which so many of his successors have tried to follow.
If the trail he made was rough and difficult, it at least possesses the
merits of vigor and pristine achievement. "The Spy," "The Pioneers," and
"The Pilot" established Cooper's reputation not only in this country,
but in England and France. He became a literary lion, with the result
that his head, never very firmly set upon his shoulders, was completely
turned; he set himself up as a mentor and critic of both continents, and
while his successive novels continued to be popular, he himself became
involved in numberless personal controversies, which embittered his
later years.

The result of these quarrels was apparent in his work, which steadily
decreased in merit, so that, of the thirty-three novels that he wrote,
not over twelve are, at this day, worth reading. But those twelve paint,
as no other novelist has ever painted, life in the forest and on the
ocean, and however we may quarrel with his wooden men and women, his
faults of taste and dreary wastes of description, there is about them
some intangible quality which compels the interest and grips the
imagination of sch