But America, in this awkward age of its youthful growth, was in no mood either to profit by criticisms or to be indifferent to them. Cooper began to regard the attitude of Americans as pusillanimous. They toadied to foreign opinion, and dared not stand up for America abroad; while at home nothing American was ever to be criticised. When he expressed the opinion that the bay of Naples was more beautiful than the bay of New York, or complained that the streets of New York were ill-paved and poorly lighted as compared with those of foreign cities, he was informed by the hushed voices of friends that it would never do. His criticisms of America were received with deeper umbrage, as coming from an American, than the sarcasms of Dickens which, ten years later, aroused a tempest of indignation. It was in these circumstances that he returned to the village of his youth, and took up his residence at Otsego Hall, in Cooperstown. Here he wrote the _Letter to His Countrymen_ in which he set out to answer certain criticisms of his writings that had appeared in New York newspapers, and, in apparent disgust, publicly announced that he had made up his mind to abandon authorship. Into this letter he imported some remarks upon a political controversy which was then agitating the nation, and touched the political situation in such a way, at a time when feeling ran high, that he succeeded in enraging the adherents of both political parties. A storm of newspaper abuse then fell upon Cooper. He was not the man to realize that, in controversy, silence is sometimes the most effective weapon. He replied to every attack. Nor did he remain on the defensive. He began new hostilities. He abandoned his resolution to abandon authorship. _The Monikins_, a satirical novel in which men are burlesqued by monkeys, was published in 1835. In the ten volumes of travel published from 1836 to 1838 he dealt out occasional criticisms of both England and America with so impartial a hand that he drew down upon himself the savage vituperation of the press on both sides of the Atlantic. Then came the period during which, from being the most popular American author, he became the most unpopular man of letters to whom the nation has ever given birth. "For years," says Lounsbury, "a storm of abuse fell upon him, which for violence, for virulence, and even for malignity, surpassed anything in the history of American literature, if not in the history of literature itself." [Illustration: THREE-MILE POINT]