e sale of his writings; and since his
death it has been a principal agency in keeping alive a distorted and
fictitious view of his personal character. A common impression came to
be of him something like the description which Greeley's lawyers gave of
the estimation in which he was held in Otsego County, in some legal
papers bearing the date of July, 1845. This was to the effect that he
had acquired and had among his neighbors "the reputation of a proud,
captious, censorious, arbitrary, dogmatical, malicious, illiberal,
revengeful, and litigious man." This one-sided and hostile view of a
strongly-marked character had just enough of truth in it to cause it to
be widely received as an accurate and complete picture. In a similar way
the notion became current that he sought to ape the manners of the
English aristocracy. Whatever Cooper's foibles were, they were none of
them imported. He was too proud in feeling and too self-centred in
opinion ever to think of aping anything or anybody. But on these points
the prejudices and misrepresentations of that day have lasted down to
this.

The account given makes it clear that the occasion of bringing the first
of these libel suits was accidental. But as time went on the prosecution
of them assumed to Cooper the shape of a duty. When once it had taken on
that character, no possible degree of unpopularity or odium could have
prevented him from persisting in his course. He treated with disdain the
common arguments used to persuade him to abandon them. To one of these
he referred directly in a novel published in 1844. He was insisting upon
the superiority of the past to the present, a sentiment which (p. 199)
became a favorite burden of his latter-day utterances. "The public sense
of right," he said, "had not become blunted by familiarity with abuses,
and the miserable and craven apology was never heard for not enforcing
the laws that nobody cared for what the newspapers say." He certainly
had some justification for the hardest things he thought and said of the
press. The newspapers which circulated the false reports about his
father's disposition of the property at Three Mile Point never corrected
them after the precise facts had been published. Many of them continued
to repeat the original statements after they must have known them to be
untrue. Nor did they stop here. As the British press had in his case
done all it could to justify the charge Cooper made against it of
ferociou