that country as
being more repulsive, artificial, and cumbered, and, in short, more
absurd and frequently less graceful than that of any other European
nation. Theoretically, the English care nothing for foreign opinion.
They have said it so often among themselves that most of them look upon
it as a point which has been settled by the consent of mankind. But like
many other beliefs it has become an article of faith without having
become an article of practice. To this extent it is true that they care
nothing for the remarks of obscure men of which they never hear. On the
other hand, no nation is more sensitive to contemporary foreign opinion,
coming from writers of distinction. There will be plenty of (p. 106)
instances furnished in this one biography to prove fully this assertion.
Cooper's attack was never forgotten or forgiven. From this time there
was a distinctly hostile feeling manifested toward him in many of the
English periodicals. Even before his next work appeared, London
correspondents of American newspapers announced that it was going to be
severely criticised, inasmuch as the novelist had made himself unpopular
in England by the comments made and the views put forth in the "Notions
of the Americans." If this were not true, it was at least believed to be
true. Certainly the fact of hostility steadily increasing from this
period, on the part of the British press, cannot be denied, whatever we
may think of the causes that brought it about. Nor did it stop short
with depreciation of his works. Literary criticism, even if based merely
upon personal dislike, can always resort with safety to the cheap
defense that it is honest. But there were reviewers who went farther,
who framed for Cooper imaginary feelings and then proceeded to assail
him for having them. He was accused, especially, of pluming himself
highly upon the title of the "American Scott." Hazlitt, for instance,
seeing him strutting, as he terms it, in the streets of Paris, was
enabled to detect by the way the novelist walked the way he felt upon
this special matter, and afterward to state the conclusion at which he
had arrived as a positive fact. Similar specimens of fine critical
insight into Cooper's motives and sentiments can be found scattered up
and down the pages of English journals.

At the time he was bringing out "The Water Witch" in Germany, the
revolution in France took place that resulted in the expulsion of (p. 107)
the Bourbons a