During the first three years abroad he went on, under the headway gained at home, with three novels of American themes--one in the "Leatherstocking" series, one on Puritan life in New England, and one sea story. Then he went off on a side issue and sacrificed the next ten years to controversial books which are very interesting side lights on literary history but very defective novels. The whole sequence started with Cooper's resentment at the "certain condescension in foreigners" which was to make Lowell smart nearly forty years later. To meet this, and particularly the condescension of the English, he left the field of fiction to write "Notions of the Americans; Picked up by a Traveling Bachelor." It failed of its purpose because it was too complacent about America and now and then too offensive about England, but the underlying trouble with it was its aggressive tone. A man could hardly make friends for America when he was in the temper to write of Englishmen, "We have good reason to believe, there exists a certain querulous class of readers who consider even the most delicate and reserved commendations of this western world as so much praise unreasonably and dishonestly abstracted from themselves." Cooper never could refrain from "the retort of abuse" against which Irving had advised in "The Sketch Book." Then followed three novels located in Venice, Germany, and Switzerland,--"The Bravo," "The Headsman," and "The Heidenmauer,"--all designed to show how charming was Old World tradition and how mistaken was its undemocratic scheme of life. They were failures, like "Precaution," because Cooper could not write an effective novel which attempted to prove anything. It was his gift to tell a good story well and to build it out of the material in the midst of which he had grown up. By the time he was ready to come back to America he had become kinked and querulous. The story of his controversies is too long for detailing in this chapter. The chief literary result of it is the pair of stories "Homeward Bound" and "Home as Found." The point of them, for they again were written to prove something, was to expose the crudities of a commercialized America. There is no question that the country was crude and raw (see pp. 111-114). A period of such rapid development was bound to produce for the time poor architecture, bad manners, shifty business, superficial learning, and questionable politics. Many other critics, home and foreign, were telling the truth about America to its great discomfort. Cooper's picture of Aristabulus Bragg was probably not unfair to hundreds of his contemporaries: