Romantic themes were for Cooper more important and interesting than restoration of the historic past. The instinctive Toryism that made it natural for Scott to poetize history had no counterpart in Cooper’s rationalized liberalism.[7] But it was not necessary for his mind to be saturated with history as was that of Scott. Compared with Europe, America had little history, and that little Cooper knew, particularly as it pertained to New York. In the present instance, he had his information from eye-witnesses and from nine years’ residence on the scenes. It was decidedly to Cooper’s advantage to have a “legend,” or the outline of a plot, suggested to him, since, with this in mind, he could in unfolding a story give to it all the illusion of reality. “Perhaps by chance,” says Carl Van Doren, “Cooper here hit upon a type of plot at which he excelled, a struggle between contending forces, not badly matched, arranged as a pursuit in which the pursued are, as a rule, favored by the author and reader.”[8] High and low characters could easily be borrowed, in fact, his public expected that. The Wharton family, consisting of a high-spirited young blond, a faded elder daughter, a young officer, and a feeble father was the conventional novel family; the pedlar as the central link of the action came from _The Antiquary_; Dr. Sitgreaves was an imitation of Scott’s pedants; Betty Flanagan, the sutler, partook of the nature of Miss Edgeworth’s Irish characters of low life; the negro was an adaptation of the court fool; the remaining characters were be-captained and be-majored as was fitting in a tale of love and war.