racters with the scenes of nature the more life-like are they.
No one has painted the Indian character, with all its varieties of
intellectual and emotional contrasts, with its honor and shame, its
tenderness and its severity, as has the author of "The Last of the
Mohicans." No one has created a character in American fiction more
original, more certain of immortality, or combining more elements
worthy of the novelist's best skill than Leather-Stocking.

Among his many stories is large range of excellence. It is usually
considered that of his sea tales "The Red Rover" is the best, the
product of his early career, and that of the Indian stories "The
Pathfinder" and "The Deerslayer" represent his highest achievement, as
they are the work of the last years. But in thus distinguishing
certain books, no one can forget that in "The Spy," his second work,
or "The Pioneers," or "The Pilot," or "The Last of the Mohicans,"
Cooper has written books which are among the most popular and most
powerful of their kind.

James Fenimore Cooper, both as a man and as an author, has entered
largely into American life and literature. He was thoroughly human. He
was strong, and strength with eccentricities--and Cooper had these--is
more attractive and moving than mild weakness attended by the graces
of propriety. He was proud without vanity; a good hater, yet beloved
to devotion in his home; severe, yet holding himself to a high
standard of justice; of mighty passions, yet also of mighty will for
their control; loyal to what he would esteem right principle;
patriotic though the severest critic of his country; a Puritan in
character though condemning the Puritan character of New England;
frank, fearless, truthful. He lacked tact, and for the lack he paid
the penalty of obloquy; there was little of the compromising or
conciliatory in his nature. But he had what men of tact are in peril
of lacking--the heroic qualities of mind and heart and will and
conscience. He was a faithful husband, a loving father. So
scrupulously careful was he of the interests of his children that his
own daughter says she was not permitted to read her father's books
before she was eighteen. His influence is ever in favor of simple
truth and simple righteousness. As Mr. James Russell Lowell says: "I
can conceive of no healthier reading for a boy, or girl either, than
Scott's novels, or Cooper's, to speak only of the dead. I have found
them very good reading, at least, fo