being provincial. She is taken along with the rest to
Templeton. On her way thither she is steadily snubbed by the masculine
element of the party, and henpecked by the feminine. The reader comes in
time to have the sincerest pity for this unfortunate girl, who is made
to pay very dearly for the misfortune of being akin to a family whose
members had become too superior to be gracious and too polished to be
polite.

In the composition of this work Cooper seems to have lost all sense of
the ridiculous. The personages whom he wished to make particularly
attractive are uniformly disagreeable. A French governess appears in the
story, who is simply insufferable. He brings in an American woman, Mrs.
Bloomfield, as a representative, according to him, of that class which
equals, if it does not surpass, in the brilliancy of its conversation
the best to be found in European salons. She is introduced discoursing
on the civilization of the country in a way that would speedily (p. 155)
empty any of the parlors of her native land. Indeed, throughout the work
the characters converse as no rational beings ever conversed under any
sort of provocation. But it is in the speeches of the heroine that the
language reaches its highest development. She can emphatically be said
to talk like a book. She does not guess, she hazards conjectures. She
playfully addresses her father as "thoughtless, precipitate parent."
When she is asked what she thinks of the country now that an attempt was
made to take possession of the Point, she describes her character, as
drawn in this novel, as no words of another can. "Miss Effingham," she
says, "has been grieved, disappointed, nay, shocked, but she will not
despair of the republic." Indeed the only person in the work who has any
near kinship to humanity is one of the inferior characters, named
Aristobulus Bragg. He is the more attractive because he says bright
things unconsciously; while the heavy characters say heavy things under
the impression that they are light.

This book had a profound influence upon Cooper's fortunes. From
beginning to end it was a blunder. It cannot receive even the negative
praise of being a work in which the best of intentions was marred by the
worst of taste. Its spirit was a bad spirit throughout. It was dreadful
to think some of the things found in it; but it was more dreadful to say
them. There was a great deal of truth in its pages, but if the views
expressed in it had been a