Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 1, Colonial and Revolutionary Literature: Early National Literature: Part I
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

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[208] or patriotic, on their part had not been idle, whether in the magazines or in books. Niles' weekly Register, and The North American review, with Edward Everett as editor, hurried to the defence, and Timothy Dwight, Irving, Fenimore Cooper, and Paulding were among those who, with or without finesse, parried the foreign thrusts. Robert Walsh wrote An appeal from the judgments of great Britain respecting the United States (18 9), while John Neal of Portland carried the fight into the enemy's camp by contributing to Blackwood's magazine from 1823 until 1826. After Dwight's death his Travels in New England and New York were published, four substantial volumes, representing vacation journeys which he had taken for reasons of health from 1796 on. They are full of exact information on every conceivable subject — on the prevailing winds, on the “excellencies of the colonists of New England,” “their enterprise and industry, their love of science and learning, their love of liberty, their morality, their piety,” on the superiority of soil and climate, etc. But the serious vein was not the only one for such a contest, as Paulding was aware when he wrote the anonymous John Bull in America, or the New Munchausen (1825), which for its time was effective as an allegorical satire upon English opinion in relation to travellers. It is now less amusing than the strictures that called it forth. But there is something trivial about the whole episode.

The best kind of reply to the taunt of Sydney Smith was the literary work of Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving, who are more fully treated elsewhere in this history.¹ Of Cooper's novels, three more important ones had been produced before he was entangled in the controversies that occupied much of his life. The pioneers reflected his early experiences on the frontier; while The last of the Mohicans deserves notice because it contains, in distinct types, both the idealized and the unidealized Indian that we have seen in the travellers. Chingachgook is a true descendant of Montaigne's high-minded savage, and belongs to the family of Rousseau's “natural” man; whereas the base “Mingoes” are more like real aborigines. The prairie, with its large element of description, was followed during the author's residence abroad by Notions of the Americans picked up by a travelling bachelor (1828), a series of letters by