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 her from detractors abroad; he sought to save her from flatterers at home.  I will not say that he was in as good humor with his country when he wrote Home at Found, as when he wrote his Notions of the Americans, but this I will say that whether he commended or censured, he did it in the sincerity of his heart, as a true American, and in the belief that it would do good.  His Notions of the Americans were more likely to lessen than to increase his popularity in Europe, inasmuch as they were put forth without the slightest regard to European prejudices.

In 1829, he brought out the novel entitled the Wept of Wishton-Wish, one of the few of his works which we now rarely hear mentioned.  He was engaged in the composition of a third nautical tale, which he afterwards published under the name of the Water-Witch, when the memorable revolution of the Three Days of July broke out.  He saw a government, ruling by fear and in defiance of public opinion, overthrown in a few hours, with little bloodshed; he saw the French nation, far from being intoxicated with their new liberty, peacefully addressing themselves to the discussion of the institutions under which they were to live.  A work which Cooper afterwards published, his Residence in Europe, gives the outline of a plan of government for France furnished by him at that time, to La Fayette, with whom he was in habits of close and daily intimacy.  It was his idea to give permanence to the new order of things by associating two strong parties in its support, the friends of legitimacy and the republicans.  He suggested that Henry V. should be called to the hereditary throne of France, a youth yet to be educated as the head of a free people, that the peerage should be abolished, and a legislature of two chambers established, with a constituency of at least a million and a half of electors; the senate to be chosen by the general vote, as the representative of the entire nation, and the members of the other house to be chosen by districts, as the representatives of the local interests.  To the middle ground of politics so ostentatiously occupied by Louis Philippe at the beginning of his reign, he predicted a brief duration, believing that it would speedily be merged in despotism, or supplanted by the popular rule.  His prophecy has been fulfilled more amply than he could have imagined—­fulfilled in both its alternatives.