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 school-boy and gray-beard alike. He splashed his paint on a great canvas with a whitewash brush, so to speak; it will not bear minute examination; but at a distance, with the right perspective, it fairly glows with life. No other American novelist has added to fiction three such characters as those we have mentioned; into those he breathed the breath of life--the supreme achievement of the novelist. For seventeen years after the publication of "The Spy," Cooper had no considerable American rival. Then, in 1837, the publication of a little volume called "Twice-Told Tales" marked the advent of a greater than he. No one to-day seriously questions Nathaniel Hawthorne's right to first place among American novelists, and in the realm of the short story he has only one equal, Edgar Allan Poe.