onditioned" of authors. Altogether Cooper must have been impressed
with the effectiveness of the blow which he had struck by the violence
with which it was resented. It seems hard to believe that remarks such
as have been quoted should have been thought to establish anything but
the vulgarity of the men who wrote them. Yet they apparently answered
their purpose. The very latest notice of Cooper's life which has
appeared in Great Britain, characterizes his work on England as an
"outburst of vanity and ill-temper." It certainly contained some
ill-judged remarks which have been made the most of by his enemies; but
this estimate, like many other assertions in the same sketch, was (p. 176)
not got from reading the work itself, but from what British periodicals
had said about it.

Such was the kind of criticism that the novelist now mainly received in
the two great English-speaking countries. These flowers of invective do
not constitute an anthology which an Englishman or American of today can
read with pleasure, or contemplate with pride. It was the comments made
by his countrymen that naturally touched Cooper most nearly. His nature
was of a kind to feel keenly, and resent warmly insinuations and charges
that impugned the purity of his motives. Nor was his a disposition to
rest quiet under attack or to assume merely the defensive. He retorted
in letters, in works of fiction, and in books of travel. Finally he
resorted to libel suits. Never, indeed, was a fiercer fight carried on
by an individual against a power more mighty than Cooper carried on with
the press. It had a thousand tongues, he had but one; but it often
seemed as if his one had the force of a thousand. The epithets he
applied to newspapers were not of the kind with which they were in the
habit of celebrating themselves. Their enterprise in obtaining news he
described as a mercenary diligence in the collection and diffusion of
information, whether true or false. Nor were his comments upon those
concerned in carrying them on more favorable. What we should call a
reporter he, on one occasion, mildly spoke of as a "miscreant who
pandered for the press." In the last novel he wrote, he energetically
termed this whole class the funguses of letters who flourished on the
dunghill of the common mind; and that in their view the sole use for
which the universe was created was to furnish paragraphs for
newspapers. Men in the higher grades of the profession fared (p. 1