m up; the press shall pull him down!" He
began to be bitterly attacked in some American newspapers, which accused
him of "flouting his Americanism throughout Europe."

When Cooper returned to America in 1833 it was with a sore heart. He had
tried to set Europe right about America, and the result had been only to
arouse resentment abroad and antagonism at home. It is not surprising
that he found America much changed in seven years, and not for the
better. It had been a period of rapid growth. New men were beginning to
push the "old families" to the wall, and social rank was beginning to
wait on wealth, in utter indifference to the classifications of the
elder aristocracy. To Cooper it seemed that while America had grown in
his absence there had been a vast expansion of mediocrity. Manners were
dying out; architecture had become debased; towns were larger but more
tawdry. In these observations, although they were furiously resented at
the time, Cooper was probably correct. There was a period of about fifty
years in the nineteenth century, when, in the development of material
resources, there was a large indifference to manners in America, and a
decline in the love for beautiful things and in the power to create
them. This period of neglect toward the refinements of life set in at
just about the time of Cooper's residence abroad.

But America, in this awkward age of its youthful growth, was in no mood
either to profit by criticisms or to be indifferent to them. Cooper
began to regard the attitude of Americans as pusillanimous. They toadied
to foreign opinion, and dared not stand up for America abroad; while at
home nothing American was ever to be criticised. When he expressed the
opinion that the bay of Naples was more beautiful than the bay of New
York, or complained that the streets of New York were ill-paved and
poorly lighted as compared with those of foreign cities, he was informed
by the hushed voices of friends that it would never do. His criticisms
of America were received with deeper umbrage, as coming from an
American, than the sarcasms of Dickens which, ten years later, aroused a
tempest of indignation.

It was in these circumstances that he returned to the village of his
youth, and took up his residence at Otsego Hall, in Cooperstown. Here he
wrote the _Letter to His Countrymen_ in which he set out to answer
certain criticisms of his writings that had appeared in New York
newspapers, and, in apparent disgust,