Cooper's wide audience of general readers is here in agreement with Sainte-Beuve the critic and Thackeray the novelist. Whatever else may be said of Cooper's works it is certain that in the man Natty Bumppo, known as "Leather-Stocking," "Pathfinder," "Deerslayer," and "La Longue Carabine," Cooper created an immortal being. Among heroes of fiction Leather-Stocking stands with the few that are as real to the imagination as the personages of veritable history. Readers of Cooper recall Leather-Stocking with genuine affection; others, without having read a line of the _Leather-Stocking Tales_ have somehow formed an idea of his person and character. Leather-Stocking is a rare hero in being noble without being offensive. "Perhaps there is no better proof of Cooper's genuine power," says Brander Matthews, "than that he can insist on Leather-Stocking's goodness,--a dangerous gift for a novelist to bestow on a man,--and that he can show us Leather-Stocking declining the advances of a handsome woman,--a dangerous position for a novelist to put a man in,--without any reader ever having felt inclined to think Leather-Stocking a prig." Leather-Stocking was first introduced to the public in _The Pioneers_, the novel descriptive of early days in Cooperstown which Cooper published in 1823. The character was not yet fully developed, but Nathaniel Bumppo in outward appearance stood at once complete. "He was tall, and so meagre as to make him seem above even the six feet that he actually stood in his stockings. On his head, which was thinly covered with lank, sandy hair, he wore a cap made of fox-skin. His face was skinny, and thin almost to emaciation; but yet it bore no signs of disease; on the contrary, it had every indication of the most robust and enduring health. The cold and the exposure had, together, given it a color of uniform red. His gray eyes were glancing under a pair of shaggy brows, that overhung them in long hairs of gray mingled with their natural hue; his scraggy neck was bare, and burnt to the same tint with his face. A kind of coat, made of dressed deerskin, with the hair on, was belted close to his lank body, by a girdle of colored worsted. On his feet were deerskin moccasins, ornamented with porcupines' quills, after the manner of the Indians, and his limbs were guarded with long leggings of the same material as the moccasins, which, gartering over the knees of his tarnished buckskin breeches, had obtained for him, among the settlers, the nick-name of Leather-Stocking."