It has been said by some critics, who judge of Cooper by his failures, that he had no skill in drawing female characters.  By the same process, it might, I suppose, be shown that Raphael was but an ordinary painter.  It 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 Revue Britannique, and warned his countrymen against the too common error of resorting, with a blind deference, to foreign authorities, often swayed by national or political prejudices, for our opinions of American authors.  Going beyond this topic, he examined and reprehended the habit of applying to the interpretation of our own constitution maxims derived from the practice of other governments, particularly that of Great Britain.  The importance of construing that instrument by its own principles, he illustrated by considering several points in dispute between parties of the day, on which he gave very decided opinions.