was any class so eager to free itself from charges
that imputed to it the presumption of holding independent views of its
own. Out of the intellectual character of many of those who at that
day pretended to be the representatives of the highest education in
this country, it almost seemed that the element of manliness had been
wholly eliminated; and that along with its sturdy democracy, whom no
obstacles thwarted and no dangers daunted, the New World was also to
give birth to a race of literary cowards and parasites. With such a
state of feeling prevalent, a work of fiction that concerned America
might seem to have small chance of success with Americans themselves.
It would not, therefore, have been strange, under any circumstances,
that in beginning his career as an author Cooper should have chosen to
write a tale of English social life. The fact that he knew (p. 020)
personally nothing about what he was describing was in itself no
insuperable objection. That ignorance was then and has since been
shared by many novelists on both sides of the water, who have treated
of the same subject. Relying upon English precedent, he might in fact
feel that he was peculiarly fitted for the task. He had cruised a few
times up and down the British channel, he had caught limited views of
British manners and customs by walking on several occasions the length
of Fleet Street and the Strand. Knowledge of America equivalent to
this would then have been regarded in England as an ample equipment
for an accurate treatise upon the social life of this country, and
even upon its existing political condition and probable future.

But much more than the choice of a foreign subject did the pretense of
foreign authorship prove the servility of feeling prevailing at that
time among the educated classes. This was in the first place, to be
sure, the result of the freak that led Cooper originally to begin
writing a novel; but it was a freak that would never have been carried
out, after publication had been decided upon, had he not been fully
aware of the fact that the least recommendation of a book to his
countrymen would be the knowledge that it was composed by one of
themselves. "Precaution" was not merely a tale of English social life,
it purported to be written by an Englishman; and it was so thoroughly
conformed to its imaginary model that it not only reechoed the cant of
English expression, but likewise the expression of English cant. To
ta