could not but admit that these grave defects were attended by striking merits, which pleaded in mitigation of literary sentence.  It was stamped with a truth, earnestness, and vital power, of which its predecessor gave no promise.  Though the story was improbable, it seized upon the attention with a powerful grasp from the very start, and the hold was not relaxed till the end.  Whatever criticism it might challenge, no one could call it dull:  the only offence in a book which neither gods nor men nor counters can pardon.  If the narrative flowed languidly at times, there were moments in which the incidents flashed along with such vivid rapidity that the susceptible reader held his breath over the page.  The character of Washington was an elaborate failure, and the author, in his later years, regretted that he had introduced this august form into a work of fiction; but Harvey Birch was an original sketch, happily conceived, and, in the main, well sustained.  His mysterious figure was recognized as a new accession to the repertory of the novelist, and not a mere modification of a preexisting type.  And, above all, “The Spy” had the charm of reality; it tasted of the soil; it was the first successful attempt to throw an imaginative light over American history, and to do for our country what the author of “Waverley” had done for Scotland.  Many of the officers and soldiers of the Revolutionary War were still living, receiving the reward of their early perils and privations in the grateful reverence which was paid to them by the contemporaries of their children and grandchildren.  Innumerable traditionary anecdotes of those dark days of suffering and struggle, unrecorded in print, yet lingered in the memories of the people, and were told in the nights of winter around the farm-house fire; and of no part of the country was this more true than of the region in which the scene of the novel is laid.  The enthusiasm with which it was there read was the best tribute to the substantial fidelity of its delineations.  All over the country, it enlisted in its behalf the powerful sentiment of patriotism; and whatever the critics might say, the author had the satisfaction of feeling that the heart of the people was with him.

Abroad, “The Spy” was received with equal favor.  It was soon translated into most of the languages of Europe; and even the “gorgeous East” opened for it its rarely moving portals.  In 1847, a Persian version was published in Ispahan; and by this time it may have crossed the Chinese wall, and be delighting the pig-tailed critics and narrow-eyed beauties of Pekin.

The success of “The Spy” unquestionably determined Cooper’s vocation, and made him a man of letters.  But he had not yet found where his true strength lay.  His training and education had not been such as would seem to be a good preparation for a literary career.  His reading had been desultory, and not extensive; and the habit of composition had not been formed in early life.  Indeed, in mere