In 1823, and in his thirty-fourth year, Cooper brought out his novel of the Pioneers, the scene of which was laid on the borders of his: own beautiful lake. In a recent survey of Mr; Cooper's works, by one of his admirers, it is intimated that the reputation of this work may have been, in some degree factitious. I cannot think so; I cannot see how such a work could fail of becoming, sooner or later, a favorite. It was several years after its first appearance that I read the Pioneers, and I read it with a delighted astonishment. Here, said I to myself, is the poet of rural life in this country--our Hesiod, our Theocritus, except that he writes without the restraint of numbers, and is a greater poet than they. In the Pioneers, as in a moving picture, are made to pass before us the hardy occupations and spirited, amusements of a prosperous settlement, in, a fertile region, encompassed for leagues around with the primeval wilderness of woods. The seasons in their different aspects, bringing with them, their different employments; forests falling before the axe; the cheerful population, with the first mild; day of spring, engaged in the sugar orchards; the chase of the deer through the deep woods, and into the lake; turkey-shooting, during the Christmas holidays, in which the Indian marksman vied for the prize of skill with the white man; swift sleigh rides under the bright winter sun, and, perilous encounters with wild animals in the forests; these, and other scenes of rural life, drawn, as Cooper knew how to draw them, in the bright and healthful coloring of which he was master are interwoven with a regular narrative of human fortunes, not unskilfully constructed; and how could such a work be otherwise than popular? In the Pioneers, Leatherstocking; is first introduced--a philosopher of the woods, ignorant of books, but instructed in all that nature, without the aid of, science, could reveal to the man of quick senses and inquiring intellect, whose life has been passed under the open sky, and in companionship with a race whose animal perceptions are the acutest and most cultivated of which there is any example. But Leatherstocking has higher qualities; in him there is a genial blending of the gentlest virtues of the civilized man with the better nature of the aboriginal tribes; all that in them is noble, generous, and ideal, is adopted into his own kindly character, and all that is evil is rejected. But why should I attempt to analyse a character so familiar? Leatherstocking is acknowledged, on all hands, to be one of the noblest, as well as most striking and original creations of fiction. In some of his subsequent novels, Cooper--for he had not yet Attained to the full maturity of his powers--heightened and ennobled his first conception of the character, but in the Pioneers it dazzled the world with the splendor of novelty;