to assert a negative. But if a personal reference
may be pardoned, I am disposed to say, that of the generation that (p. 134)
has come upon the stage of active life since Cooper's death, I am
the only person who has read this work through. The knowledge of it
possessed by his contemporaries did not, in many cases, approach to the
dignity of being even second-hand. The accounts of it that have come
under my own notice, seem often to have been gathered from reviews of it
which had themselves been written by men who had never read the
original. It is no difficult matter to explain the neglect into which it
immediately sank. The work was a satire mainly upon certain of the
social and political features to be found in England and America,
designated respectively as Leaphigh and Leaplow; though one or two
things characteristic of France were transferred to the former country.
But satire Cooper could not write. The power of vigorous invective he
had in a marked degree. But the wit which plays while it wounds, which
while saying one thing means another, which deals in far-off suggestion
and remote allusion, this was something entirely unsuited to the
directness and energy of his intellect. Moreover, some of his most
marked literary defects were seen here exaggerated and unrelieved. In
many of his novels there is prolixity in the introduction. Still in
these it is often compensated by descriptions of natural scenery so
life-like and so enthusiastic that even the most _blase_ of novel
readers is carried along in a state of what may be called endurable
tediousness. But in "The Monikins" the introductory tediousness is
unendurable. It is not until we are nearly half-way into the work and
have actually entered upon the voyage to the land of the monkeys, that
the dullness at all disappears. After the country of Leaphigh is reached
the story is far less absurd and more entertaining; though (p. 135)
Cooper's descriptions are of the nature of caricature rather than of
satire. There are, however, many shrewd and caustic remarks scattered up
and down the pages of the latter part of the work, but they will never
be known to anybody, for nobody will read the book through.

The work fell perfectly dead from the press. But its failure had not the
least effect in deterring Cooper from continuing in the course upon
which he had started. During the years 1836, 1837, and 1838, he
published ten volumes of travels. In these he repeated, with