"America has had among her representatives of the irritable race of writers many who have shown far more ability to get on pleasantly with their fellows than Cooper.... But she counts on the scanty roll of her men of letters the name of no one who acted from purer patriotism or loftier principle. She finds among them all no manlier nature and no more heroic soul." GREATEST ROMANCES.--Cooper's greatest achievement is the series known as _The Leatherstocking Tales_. These all have as their hero Leatherstocking, a pioneer variously known as Hawkeye, _La Longue Carabine_ (The Long Rifle), and Natty Bumppo. A statue of this great original creation of American fiction now overlooks Otsego Lake. Leatherstocking embodies the fearlessness, the energy, the rugged honesty, of the worthiest of our pioneers, of those men who opened up our vast inland country and gave it to us to enjoy. Ulysses is no more typically Grecian than Leatherstocking is American. _The Leatherstocking Tales_ are five in number. The order in which they should be read to follow the hero from youth to old age is as follows:-- [Footnote: The figures in parenthesis refer to the date of publication.] _The Deerslayer; or The First War Path_ (1841). _The Last of the Mohicans; a Narrative of 1757_ (1826). _The Pathfinder; or the Inland Sea_ (1840). _The Pioneers; or the Sources of the Susquehanna_ (1823). _The Prairie; a Tale_ (1827) [Illustration: LEATHERSTOCKING] This sequence may be easily remembered from the fact that the first chief words in the titles, "Deerslayer," "Mohicans," "Pathfinder," "Pioneers," and "Prairie," are arranged in alphabetical order. These books are the prose _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ of the eighteenth-century American pioneer. Instead of relating the fall of Ilium, Cooper tells of the conquest of the wilderness. The wanderings or Leatherstocking in the forest and the wilderness are substituted for those of Ulysses on the sea. This story could not have been related with much of the vividness of an eye-witness of the events, if it had been postponed beyond Cooper's day. Before that time had forever passed, he fixed in living romance one remarkable phase of our country's development. The persons of this romantic drama were the Pioneer and the Indian; the stage was the trackless forest and the unbroken wilderness. [Illustration: COOPER AT THE AGE OF FORTY FIVE] _The Last of the Mohicans_ has been the favorite of the greatest number of readers. In this story Chingachgook, the Indian, and Uncas, his son, share with Hawkeye our warmest admiration. The American boy longs to enter the fray to aid Uncas. Cooper knew that the Indian had good traits, and he embodied them in these two red men. Scott took the same liberty of presenting the finer aspects of chivalry and neglecting its darker side. Cooper, however, does show an Indian fiend in Magua.