It is not for an American to find fault with the laudatory tone of a work which reflects the ardent love of country felt by the writer. Yet in many respects it is a singular production. In manner it is calm, grave, almost philosophical; there is not the slightest effort at (p. 103) fine writing; the tone can never be said to be even fervid. Yet it must be confessed that not in the most exalted of Fourth of July orations does the national eagle scream with a shriller note, or wing his way with a more unflagging flight. Any one who formed his notions of this country exclusively from this book, would be sure to fancy that here at last paradise was reopening to the children of a fallen race. After this remark, it may seem ridiculous, and yet it is perfectly just to say, that Cooper, so far from giving way to exaggeration in his assertions, kept himself well within the bounds of the truth. In the exercise of that duty which presses heavily upon every reviewer, to seem, if not to be wiser than his author, many of the English periodicals, even those most favorable to America, undertook to doubt his statements of fact, to sneer at his prophecies of the future as ludicrous exaggerations, and to term them striking and whimsical instances of Yankee braggadocio, and of the love of building castles in the air. Cooper could not well overstate the material prosperity and progress of the country, nor the inability of men trained under different conditions either to believe it or to comprehend it. Reality soon outran some of his most daring anticipations. His most extravagant statements were speedily more than confirmed by the operation of agencies whose mighty results he could not foresee, because, when he wrote, the agencies themselves did not exist. He had carefully guarded himself in one instance, by saying that he did not expect that the Northwest would be settled within an early period. The precaution was unnecessary. He had been brought up in a town, founded in the wilderness, at a distance of less than one hundred and fifty miles (p. 104) from the commercial capital of the republic. He lived long enough to see the frontiers of civilization pushed one thousand miles west of the line it had held in his boyhood's home.