m not your papa the great lyric poet.

In order to understand the local controversy which divided village
sentiment concerning Fenimore Cooper, and gave rise to the long series
of libel suits, it is necessary to consider certain influences of more
remote origin.

In 1826, when Cooper began his seven years' residence in Europe, before
making his home in Cooperstown, he had become the most widely read of
American authors. No other American writer, in fact, during the
nineteenth century, enjoyed so wide a contemporary popularity. His works
appeared simultaneously in America, England, and France. They were
speedily translated into German and Italian, and in most instances soon
found their way into the other cultivated tongues of Europe.[112]
Cooper's friend Morse said that his novels were published, as soon as he
produced them, in thirty-four different places in Europe, and that they
had been seen by American travelers in the languages of Turkey and
Persia, in Constantinople, in Egypt, at Jerusalem, at Ispahan. At a
dinner given in New York in Cooper's honor, just before his departure
for Europe, Chancellor Kent, who presided, voiced the general feeling by
toasting him as the "genius which has rendered our native soil classic
ground, and given to our early history the enchantment of fiction."

Patriotism in Cooper was almost a passion, and it burned in him with new
ardor because of the misunderstanding and disparagement of America which
he encountered almost everywhere in Europe. The praise which came to him
from Europeans irritated him with its air of surprise that anything good
could be expected from America or an American. Nor did he much
ingratiate himself in British society, where, when the conversation
turned upon matters discreditable to the United States, it became his
custom to bring up other matters discreditable to Great Britain. On the
Continent he pursued much the same course, and published his first
"novels with a purpose," _The Bravo_, _The Heidenmauer_, and _The
Headsman_, the object of which was to demonstrate the superiority of
democratic institutions over the medieval inheritances of Europe. In his
introduction to _The Heidenmauer_ he wrote a sentence that stirred the
wrath of the newspaper press of his own country: "Each hour, as life
advances," he asserted, "am I made to see how capricious and vulgar is
the immortality conferred by a newspaper." This provoked at home the
retort "The press has built hi