ortant chapter
in political science, no entire copy, I have been told, is to be found in
this country.

One of the consequences of earnest controversy is almost invariably
personal ill-will. Cooper was told by one who held an official station
under the French government, that the part he had taken in this dispute
concerning taxation would neither be forgotten nor forgiven. The dislike
he had incurred in that quarter was strengthened by his novel of the
_Bravo_, published in the year 1831, while he was in the midst of his
quarrel with the aristocratic party. In that work, of which he has himself
justly said that it was thoroughly American in all that belonged to it,
his object was to show how institutions, professedly created to prevent
violence and wrong, become, when perverted from their natural destination,
the instruments of injustice; and how, in every system which makes power
the exclusive property of the strong, the weak are sure to be oppressed.
The work is written with all the vigor and spirit of his best novels; the
magnificent city of Venice, in which the scene of the story is laid,
stands continually before the imagination; and from time to time the
gorgeous ceremonies of the Venetian republic pass under our eyes, such as
the marriage of the Doge with the Adriatic, and the, contest of the
gondolas for the prize of speed. The Bravo himself and several of the
other characters are strongly conceived and distinguished, but the most
remarkable of them all is the spirited and generous-hearted daughter of
the jailer.

It has been said by some critics, who judge of Cooper by his failures,
that he had no skill in drawing female characters. By the same process,
it might, I suppose, be shown that Raphael was but an ordinary painter. It
must be admitted that when Cooper drew a lady of high breeding, he was apt
to pay too much attention to the formal part of her character, and to make
her a mere bundle of cold proprieties. But when he places his heroines in
some situation in life which leaves him nothing to do but to make them
natural and true, I know of nothing finer, nothing more attractive or more
individual than the portraitures he has given us.

_Figaro_, the wittiest of the French periodicals, and at that time on the
liberal side, commended the _Bravo_; the journals on the side of the
government censured it. _Figaro_ afterwards passed into the hands of the
aristocratic party, and Cooper became the object of its at