his evening slumber, is no less in harmony with the silent desert in which
he wanders. Equally so are the Indians, still his companions, copies of
the American savage somewhat idealized, but not the less a part of the
wild nature in which they have their haunts.

Before the year closed, Cooper had given the world another nautical tale,
the _Red Rover_, which, with many, is a greater favorite than the _Pilot_,
and with reason, perhaps, if we consider principally the incidents, which
are conducted and described with a greater mastery over the springs of
pity and terror.

It happened to Cooper while he was abroad, as it not unfrequently happens
to our countrymen, to hear the United States disadvantageously compared
with Europe. He had himself been a close observer of things both here and
in the old world, and was conscious of being able to refute the detractors
of his country in regard to many points. He published in 1828, after he
had been two years in Europe, a series of letters, entitled _Notions of
the Americans, by a Travelling Bachelor_, in which he gave a favorable
account of the working of our institutions, and vindicated his country
from various flippant and ill-natured misrepresentations of foreigners. It
is rather too measured in style, but is written from a mind full of the
subject, and from a memory wonderfully stored with particulars. Although
twenty-four years have elapsed since its publication, but little of the
vindication has become obsolete.

Cooper loved his country and was proud of her history and her
institutions, but it puzzles many that he should have appeared, at
different times, as her eulogist, and her censor. My friends, she is
worthy both of praise and of blame, and Cooper was not the man to shrink
from bestowing either, at what seemed to him the proper time. He defended