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the public; it had lost the supreme hold which for twenty years it had maintained. The mighty master was dead; to some extent his influence had died before him. The later work he did, had in several instances detracted from, rather than added to the fame he had won by the earlier. Cooper's own ventures in the field of foreign fiction, whatever their absolute merit, could not be compared with those in which he had drawn the life of the ocean, or the streams and forests of his native land. But outside of any effect produced by poorer production, there could be no doubt of the fact of a change in the public taste. The hero of action had gone by. In his place had come the hero of observation and reflection, who did not do great things, but who said good things. The exquisite and the sentimentalist were the fashion, to be speedily followed, according to the law of reaction, by the boor and the satirist. At the time when Cooper returned from Europe, Bulwer was the popular favorite. Both in England and America he was styled the prince of living novelists; and nowhere was enthusiasm, in his behalf, crazier than in this country. The revolution in taste, moreover, worked directly in his favor in more ways than one. Scott and Cooper's heroes, whether intelligent or not, were invariably moral. But of this sort of men readers were tired. No (p. 125) character could please highly the popular palate in which there was not a distinct flavor of iniquity. More ability and less morality was the opinion generally entertained, though probably not often expressed. Hence it was not unnatural that the sentimental dandies and high-toned villains of Bulwer's earlier novels should have been the heroes to captivate all hearts. The comparatively low estimate into which the novel of adventure had sunk, undoubtedly had a marked effect upon Cooper's reputation. Some of his later work is superior to his earlier from the artistic point of view. Yet it was never received with the same praise, at least in English-speaking countries. More than that, the criticism it received was often excessively depreciatory; nor was this all due to personal unpopularity, though a good deal of it certainly was. He simply wrote in a style which the age had temporarily left behind, and fancied it had outgrown. All that Cooper had to do, all that under any circumstances he could do, was to keep on producing the best that lay in his power; sure to find a certain body of re
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