Cooper's residence in England was only for a few months during the first half of the year 1828. With his feelings towards that country and with the feeling entertained in it toward his own, nothing could have made his stay highly pleasant. But it is one of the numerous minor falsehoods that came to be connected with his life, that it was unpleasant. On the contrary, his company was sought by many of the most distinguished men, though in accordance with his usual custom he carried no letters of introduction. At a later period he said that in no country had he been personally so well treated as in England; he was as strongly convinced as his worst enemy, that as an author he had been extolled there beyond his merits; nor had he failed to receive quite as much substantial remuneration as he could properly lay claim to. But the social atmosphere there prevailing was not the atmosphere he loved. The poet Moore relates in his diary a story told him by Sydney Smith of the "touchiness" of "the Republican"--so the American novelist is styled--as evinced by the indignation of the latter at the conduct of Lord Nugent. This nobleman, it appears, invited Cooper to take a walk with him to a certain street. Arriving there he unceremoniously entered the (p. 097) house of a friend and left his companion to make his way back alone. Cooper's resentment of the treatment may have been unwisely shown; for though often termed an aristocrat, he never exhibited in the slightest degree that reticence which is or is supposed to be the peculiar characteristic of aristocracy. But few would now be found to deny that his indignation was both natural and just, and that the act of Lord Nugent was the act of a boor and not of a gentleman. It was certainly unreasonable to expect that a society which could rejoice in this method of rebuking republican pretension could itself be agreeable to a republican. Cooper could not but be offended by the prejudices he found existing against his country and the dislike usually felt and sometimes expressed for it. The only man he met whom he thought well informed about America was Sir James Mackintosh. The ignorance of some of his friends was so great that even to him it caused amusement rather than anger. Many readers will have heard of the practice of "gouging," with which, according to the veracious English traveler of early days, the native American gave the charm of diversity and diversion to a life whose serious thoughts were wholly absorbed in the acquisition of pelf. Some will remember the definition given of it in Grose's "Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue:" "to squeeze out a man's eye with the thumb; a cruel practice used by the Bostonians in America." A curious illustration of the belief in this myth occurred to Cooper. One of his friends in England was an amiable and pleasant man of letters, named William Sotheby, little heard of in these days; and even in his own days he had