ugnacious, sensitive to criticism, and
abounding in prejudices. He was embittered by the scurrilous attacks
made upon him by a portion of the American press, and spent a great
deal of time and energy in conducting libel suits against the
newspapers. In the same spirit he used fiction as a vehicle for attack
upon the abuses and follies of American life. Nearly all of {419} his
novels, written with this design, are worthless. Nor was Cooper well
equipped by nature and temperament for depicting character and passion
in social life. Even in his best romances his heroines and his
"leading juveniles"--to borrow a term from the amateur stage--are
insipid and conventional. He was no satirist, and his humor was not of
a high order. He was a rapid and uneven writer, and, unlike Irving, he
had no style.

Where Cooper was great was in the story, in the invention of incidents
and plots, in a power of narrative and description in tales of wild
adventure which keeps the reader in breathless excitement to the end of
the book. He originated the novel of the sea and the novel of the
wilderness. He created the Indian of literature; and in this, his
peculiar field, although he has had countless imitators, he has had no
equals. Cooper's experiences had prepared him well for the kingship of
this new realm in the world of fiction. His childhood was passed on
the borders of Otsego Lake, when central New York was still a
wilderness, with boundless forests stretching westward, broken only
here and there by the clearings of the pioneers. He was taken from
college (Yale) when still a lad, and sent to sea in a merchant vessel,
before the mast. Afterward he entered the navy and did duty on the
high seas and upon Lake Ontario, then surrounded by virgin forests. He
married and resigned his commission in 1811, just before the outbreak
of the war with England, so {420} that he missed the opportunity of
seeing active service in any of those engagements on the ocean and our
great lakes which were so glorious to American arms. But he always
retained an active interest in naval affairs.

His first successful novel was _The Spy_, 1821, a tale of the
Revolutionary War, the scene of which was laid in Westchester County,
N. Y., where the author was then residing. The hero of this story,
Harvey Birch, was one of the most skillfully drawn figures on his
canvas. In 1823 he published the _Pioneers_, a work somewhat overladen
with description, in