stly paid proved particularly solicitous that he should not be
honestly criticised. They showed themselves as little scrupulous in
defending him after he was dead as they had been in plundering him while
he was living.

Cooper had previously aroused the resentment of many because he had
failed to express gratification or delight at being termed "the American
Scott." He had then been assured again and again that there was no
danger of the title being applied to him in future; that in ten years
their names would never be coupled together, and that he himself would
be totally forgotten. It could hardly have been deemed a compliment in a
land where scarcely a petty district can exist peacefully and
creditably, with a hill three thousand feet in height, which is not in
time rendered disreputable by being saddled with the pretentious name of
"The American Switzerland." Personal malice alone, however, could
impute his disclaimer either to malice or to envy. His own (p. 162)
estimate of his relations to the British novelist, he had given many
times; and indirectly at that very time in his account in the first
"Knickerbocker" article, of his interview with Sir Walter Scott. The
latter had been so obliging, he observed, as to make him a number of
flattering speeches, which he, however, did not repay in kind. His
reserve he thought Scott did not altogether like. In this he was
probably mistaken, but the reason he gave for his own conduct savored
little of feelings of envy or rivalry. "As Johnson," he wrote, "said of
his interview with George the Third, it was not for me to bandy
compliments with my sovereign." No attention was paid to these and
similar utterances of a man whom his bitterest enemies never once dared
to charge with saying a word he did not mean.

Few at this day will be disposed to deny the justice of a good deal of
the criticism that Cooper passed upon his country and his countrymen.
Even now, though many of his strictures are directed against things that
no longer exist, there is still much in his writings that can be read
with profit. The essential justice of what he said is not impaired by
the fact that he was usually indiscreet and intemperate in the saying of
it. Nor were his motives of a low kind. He loved his country, and
nothing lay dearer to his heart than to have her what she ought to be.
The people were the source of power; and it was his cardinal principle
that power ought always to be censured