Cooper tells us, as has been said, that he lost money on this work. But there was something more than pecuniary failure that attended it. There were in it statements which met with disfavor at home. More important than these, however, were remarks that aroused personal hostility abroad. He made several references, in particular, to the people of England, and they were not of a kind to conciliate regard for himself and his work. In one place he spoke of the society of that country as being more repulsive, artificial, and cumbered, and, in short, more absurd and frequently less graceful than that of any other European nation. Theoretically, the English care nothing for foreign opinion. They have said it so often among themselves that most of them look upon it as a point which has been settled by the consent of mankind. But like many other beliefs it has become an article of faith without having become an article of practice. To this extent it is true that they care nothing for the remarks of obscure men of which they never hear. On the other hand, no nation is more sensitive to contemporary foreign opinion, coming from writers of distinction. There will be plenty of (p. 106) instances furnished in this one biography to prove fully this assertion. Cooper's attack was never forgotten or forgiven. From this time there was a distinctly hostile feeling manifested toward him in many of the English periodicals. Even before his next work appeared, London correspondents of American newspapers announced that it was going to be severely criticised, inasmuch as the novelist had made himself unpopular in England by the comments made and the views put forth in the "Notions of the Americans." If this were not true, it was at least believed to be true. Certainly the fact of hostility steadily increasing from this period, on the part of the British press, cannot be denied, whatever we may think of the causes that brought it about. Nor did it stop short with depreciation of his works. Literary criticism, even if based merely upon personal dislike, can always resort with safety to the cheap defense that it is honest. But there were reviewers who went farther, who framed for Cooper imaginary feelings and then proceeded to assail him for having them. He was accused, especially, of pluming himself highly upon the title of the "American Scott." Hazlitt, for instance, seeing him strutting, as he terms it, in the streets of Paris, was enabled to detect by the way the novelist walked the way he felt upon this special matter, and afterward to state the conclusion at which he had arrived as a positive fact. Similar specimens of fine critical insight into Cooper's motives and sentiments can be found scattered up and down the pages of English journals.