The principal effect of this pamphlet, as it seemed to me, was to awaken in certain quarters a kind of resentment that a successful writer of fiction should presume to give lessons in politics.  I meddle not here with the conclusions to which he arrived, though must be allowed to say that they were stated and argued with great ability.  In 1835 Cooper published The Monnikins, a satirical work, partly with a political aim; and in the same year appeared his American Democrat, a view of the civil and social relations of the United States, discussing more gravely various topics touched upon in the former work, and pointing out in what respects he deemed the American people in their practice to have fallen short of the excellence of their institutions.

He found time, however, for a more genial task—­that of giving to the world his observations on foreign countries.  In 1836 appeared his Sketches of Switzerland, a series of letters in four volumes, the second part published about two months after the first, a delightful work, written in a more fluent and flexible style than his Notions of the Americans.  The first part of Gleanings in Europe, giving an account of his residence in France, followed in the same year; and the second part of the same work, containing his observations on England, was published in April, 1837.  In these works, forming a series of eight volumes, he relates and describes with much of the same distinctness as in his novels; and his remarks on the manners and institutions of the different countries, often sagacious, and always peculiarly his own, derive, from their frequent reference to contemporary events, an historical interest.

In 1838 appeared Homeward Bound and Home as Found, two satirical novels, in which Cooper held up to ridicule a certain class of conductors of the newspaper press in America.  These works had not the good fortune to become popular.  Cooper did not, and, because he was too deeply in earnest, perhaps would not, infuse into his satirical works that gaiety without which satire becomes wearisome.  I believe, however, that if they had been written by anybody else they would have met with more favor; but the world knew that Cooper was able to give them something better, and would not be satisfied with anything short of his best, Some childishly imagined that because, in the two works I have just mentioned, a newspaper editor is introduced, in whose character almost every possible vice of his profession is made to find a place, Cooper intended an indiscriminate attack upon the whole body of writers for the newspaper press, forgetting that such a portraiture was a satire only on those to whom it bore a likeness We have become less sensitive and more reasonable of late, and the monthly periodicals make sport for their readers of the follies and ignorance of the newspaper editors, without awakening the slightest resentment; but Cooper led the way in this sort of discipline, and I remember some instances of towering indignation at his audacity expressed in the journals of that time.