ce, or excite
amusement on account of its exaggeration. Thurlow Weed, in 1841,
expressed a general sentiment about Cooper, with much affluence of
capital letter and solemnity of exclamatory punctuation. "He has (p. 123)
disparaged, American Lakes," wrote that editor, "ridiculed American
Scenery, burlesqued American Coin, and even satirized the American
Flag!" Cooper could hardly have expected his strictures to be received
with applause, but he was clearly surprised at the outcry they awoke.
Yet he had had plenty of opportunities to learn that other countries
were as sensitive to criticism as his own. One singular illustration of
this feeling had been exhibited at Rome. He had completed his novel of
"The Water Witch" and wished to print and publish it in that city. The
manuscript was accordingly sent to the censor. It was kept for days,
which grew to weeks. It was at last returned with refusal, unless it
were subjected to thorough revision. Almost on the opening page occurred
a highly objectionable paragraph. "It would seem," Cooper had written,
"that as nature has given its periods to the stages of animal life, it
has also set limits to all moral and political ascendency. While the
city of the Medici is receding from its crumbling walls, like the human
form shrinking into 'the lean and slippered pantaloon,' the Queen of the
Adriatic sleeping on her muddy isles, and Rome itself is only to be
traced by fallen temples and buried columns, the youthful vigor of
America is fast covering the wilds of the West with the happiest fruits
of human industry." This passage, the censor quietly but severely
pointed out, laid down a principle that was unsound, and supported it by
facts that were false. A rigid pruning could alone make the work worthy
of a license. The consequence was that Cooper carried the manuscript
with him to Germany, and it was first published in Dresden, in a land
where men were not sensitive to anything that might be said, at any rate
about Italy.

But the personal unpopularity he brought upon himself by his (p. 124)
censorious remarks will not wholly account for the unpopularity as a
writer, which it was his fortune, in no short time, to acquire. There
were other agencies at work besides those which affected the feeling
towards him as a man. Throughout the English-speaking world there had
been a literary reaction. Men had begun to tire of the novel of
adventure. It was not that it had lost its hold upon