self, though at first rather in the way of defense than
attack. As time went on it increased rather than diminished. It largely
affected his own fortunes by the personal hostility it provoked in
return. To some extent, without doubt, his oft-repeated declaration was
true, that in the dependence then existing here upon foreign opinion,
every American author held his reputation at the mercy of the British
reviewer. It would be unjust to say that it seemed at one period almost
as if Cooper had sworn towards England undying hate. But it is certainly
a fact that he gave utterance to his inmost feelings when he described
it as a country that cast a chill over his affections, a country that
all men respected but that few men loved. Yet he had been brought up in
the school of the Federalist party, in which admiration for the
literature, policy, and morals of the motherland was taught as a duty;
in which every door was thrown open to visitors from England as an act
of hospitality due to kinsmen separated merely by the accident of (p. 093)
position. He himself tells us how, an ardent boy of seventeen, he leaped
for the first time upon the soil of Great Britain, feeling for it a love
almost as devoted as that which he bore the land of his birth, and
looking upon every native of it in the light of a brother. It did not
take him long to find out that the fancied tie of kinship was not
recognized, that it was even despised; and that if he made friends, it
must be in spite of his country, and not because of it. His connection
with the navy had also led him to be keenly sensitive to the injustice
and indignities connected with the impressment of seamen. In his first
voyage in a merchant ship he had seen two native Americans taken from
the vessel and forced into the British service. His own captain even had
on one occasion been seized, though speedily liberated. There had also
been an attempt to press a Swede belonging to the crew, on the ground
that his country and England were in alliance, and the latter had
therefore a right to his help. These were not the acts to inspire
devotion towards the people who committed or who authorized them. The
keen resentment Cooper felt for the wrongs then perpetrated upon the
American marine he afterward expressed in his novels of "Wing-and-Wing"
and "Miles Wallingford." He never forgot those early experiences. When
he came to reside in Europe he was as little disposed to forgive the
depreciation of hi