Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[94] the year of Washington's inauguration and the establishment of the new republic. Irving's first book appeared just twenty years afterward, and Cooper's eleven years later still. It took that much time, not unreasonably, for the long-expected child, literature, to be born. The immediate literary descendants of these two writers were, as is not uncommon, of less merit than their ancestors; though many of them had their period of popularity and died celebrities before the American public awoke to the fact of their essential triviality. Such transitions belong to the literary history of the world; in no department is it truer than in literature that, as our racy old American proverb says, “It takes but three generations from shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves.”

In temperament, Irving and Cooper were as different as possible, except in their common sensitiveness to criticism. Cooper was impatient, opinionated, suspicious of offense, and was in consequence never on very good terms with the world, or the world with him. He was the obnoxious kind of reformer who is disposed to build everything over on theoretical principles, but seldom gets beyond