ABSTRACT
In 1832, Mr. James Fenimore Cooper was still residing in Europe, where he had been since 1828, touring through England, Belgium, Germany, France and Italy. The Bravo, however, attested on every page, the legitimacy of its authorship—the genius of Cooper pervaded the whole. The Headsman is marked with all the beauties of Mr. Cooper's best and most popular compositions. In 1835, some political strictures appeared from the pen of Mr. Cooper, that were roughly handled by the American press. Mr. Cooper has suppressed many portions of the original manuscript of the Sketches of Switzerland, for reasons which he has slightly touched upon in his preface. Mr. Cooper is now in his fiftieth year; his figure rather above the usual height, robust, and slightly inclined to portliness. The objection, a somewhat invidious one, was, that it was a foreign work; and, many thought that Mr. Cooper should have exhausted American subjects before he resorted to the hackneyed themes of Italian story.
