A characteristic instance of the wantonness with which Cooper's acts and motives were deliberately misrepresented during this period occurred in 1841. In that year came out a work, which had, in its day, some little notoriety, but has long ago passed to the limbo of forgotten things. It was called "The Glory and Shame of England." The very title shows that this production was maliciously calculated to make the British (p. 235) lion lash his tail with frenzy: and if we can trust its author, Mr. C. Edwards Lester, it met with fierce opposition from British residents in this country and their sympathizers. In an introductory letter addressed to the Reverend J. T. Headley, he told the story of the experiences his agents had undergone in securing subscriptions. In the course of it he made the following allusion to Cooper. "Already," he wrote, "have several educated and highly respectable young men engaged (with unprecedented success) in procuring subscribers for this work been rudely driven from the houses of Englishmen for crossing their threshold with the prospectus. And I blush (but not for myself or my country) to say that one of our celebrated authors, whose partiality for Republicanism has been more than doubted, threatened to kick one of these young men out of his house (castle) if he did not instantly leave it; exclaiming, 'Why have you the impudence to hand me that prospectus? I understand what the GLORY of England means; but as for the SHAME of England, there is no such thing. The shame is all in that base Democracy, which makes you presume to enter a gentleman's house to ask him to subscribe for such a work.'" This statement was widely copied in the newspapers. But the falsity of the fabrication soon became too apparent for even the journals most hostile to Cooper to endure. They made a vain effort to get from the author a confirmation of his story: but though he did not venture to repeat the lie manfully, he equivocated about it in a sneaking way. The newspapers, feeling, perhaps, that it was undesirable to arm the book agent with new terrors, credited at once the denial the story had received, and took back all imputations based upon it,--a (p. 236) proceeding which ought to have shown Cooper that they were not so utterly given over to the father of all evil as he fancied them. But the author of this impudent falsehood never withdrew it, nor did the publishers of the volume, in which it was contained, disavow it. The extract given above is taken from an edition which bears the date of 1845.