could furnish them with venison,
pheasant, wild duck, and some fresh fish. To the astonished question of
what better he supposed they could wish, the landlord meekly replied,
that he thought they might have wanted some salt pork. The story was
truer of Cooper himself than of his innkeeper. Nature he could depict,
and the wild life led in it, so that all men stood ready and eager to
gaze on the pictures he drew. He chose too often to inflict upon them,
instead of it, the most commonplace of moralizing, the stalest (p. 170)
disquisitions upon manners and customs, and the driest discussions of
politics and theology.

But the moral injury which Cooper received from these controversial
discussions and their results was far greater than the intellectual.
They swung him off the line of healthful activity. They perverted his
judgment. He looked upon the social and political movements that were
going on about him with the eye of an irritated and wronged man. Years
did not bring to him the philosophic mind, but the spirit of the
opinionated partisan and the heated denouncer. He fixed his attention so
completely on the tendencies to ill that manifested themselves in the
social state, that he often became blind to the counterbalancing
tendencies to good. Hence his later judgments were frequently one-sided
and partial. He too often took up the role of prophesying disasters that
never came to pass. Moreover, this habit of looking at one side not only
narrowed his mental vision, but turned it in the direction of petty
objects. No reader of his later novels can fail to see how often he
excites himself over matters of no serious moment; or which, whether
serious or slight, are utterly out of place where they are. By many of
these exhibitions the indifferent will be amused, but the admirers of
the man will feel pained if not outraged.

CHAPTER IX. (p. 171)

1837-1842.

By the end of 1837 Cooper had pretty sedulously improved every
opportunity of making himself unpopular. His criticisms had been
distributed with admirable impartiality. Few persons or places could
complain that they had been overlooked. The natural satisfaction that
any one would have felt in contemplating the punishment inflicted upon
his friend or neighbor, was utterly marred by the consideration of the
outrage done to himself. There was scarcely a class of Cooper's
fellow-citizens whose susceptibilit