lcated an
opinion improper for her sex. She never permitted a gentleman to ride
with her, to walk with her, to hold with her a tete-a-tete. Nor was
this result achieved with difficulty. Though she was natural and
unaffected, the simple dignity about her was sufficient to forbid any
such request, or even any such thought in the men who had the
pleasure, or, as the reader may think, the grief, of her (p. 028)
acquaintance. In short, she was not merely propriety personified; she
was propriety magnified and intensified. This particular heroine, who
could not consistently have read the book in which her own conduct is
described, finally disappears as the wife of an equally remarkable
earl. Her story, as it is told, however, strikingly exemplifies the
carelessness in working up details which is one of Cooper's marked
defects. The novel received its name, as has already been implied,
because it aimed to set forth the desirability of precaution in the
choice of husband or wife. What it actually taught, however, was its
undesirability. The misunderstandings, the crosses, the distresses, to
which the lovers were subjected in the tale all sprang from excess of
care, and not from lack of it; from exercising precaution where
precaution did nothing but harm.

The work excited but little attention in this country. In the following
year it was printed in England by Colburn, and was there noticed
without the slightest suspicion of its American authorship. In some
quarters it received fairly favorable mention. It could not be hid,
however, that the novel, as regarded the general public, had been a
failure. Still, it was not so much a failure that the author's friends
did not think well of it and see promise in it. They urged him to
renewed exertions. He had tried the experiment of depicting scenes he
had never witnessed, and a life he had never led. He had, in their
opinion, succeeded fairly well in describing what he knew nothing
about; they were anxious that he should try his hand at the representation
of manners and men of which and whom he knew something. Especially was
it made a matter of reproach that he, in heart and soul an (p. 029)
American of the Americans, should have gone to a foreign land to fill
the imagination of his countrymen with pictures of a social state
alien both in feeling and fact to their own. This was an appeal of a
kind that was certain to touch Cooper sensibly; for with him love of
country w