must be admitted that when Cooper drew a lady of high breeding, he was apt
to pay too much attention to the formal part of her character, and to make
her a mere bundle of cold proprieties. But when he places his heroines in
some situation in life which leaves him nothing to do but to make them
natural and true, I know of nothing finer, nothing more attractive or more
individual than the portraitures he has given us.

_Figaro_, the wittiest of the French periodicals, and at that time on the
liberal side, commended the _Bravo_; the journals on the side of the
government censured it. _Figaro_ afterwards passed into the hands of the
aristocratic party, and Cooper became the object of its attacks. He was
not, however, a man to be driven from any purpose which he had formed,
either by flattery or abuse, and both were tried with equal ill success.
In 1832 he published his _Heidenmauer_, and in 1833 his _Headsman of
Berne_, both with a political design similar to that of the _Bravo_,
though neither of them takes the same high rank among his works.

In 1833, after a residence of seven years in different parts of Europe,
but mostly in France, Cooper returned to his native country. The welcome
which met him here was somewhat chilled by the effect of the attacks made
upon him in France, and remembering with what zeal, and at what sacrifice
of the universal acceptance which his works would otherwise have met, he
had maintained the cause of his country against the wits and orators of
the court party in France, we cannot wonder that he should have felt this
coldness as undeserved. He published, shortly after his arrival in this
country, _A Letter to his Countrymen_ in which he complained of the
censures cast upon him in the American newspapers, gave a history of the
part he had taken in exposing the misstatements of the _Révue
Britannique_, and warned his countrymen against the too common error of
resorting, with a blind deference, to foreign authorities, often swayed by