Jim’s Reviews > The World of Washington Irving > Status Update

James Fenimore Cooper: I have never yet been in a country in which what are called the lower orders have not clearer and sounder views than their betters of the great principles which ought to predominate in the control of human affairs.

Southerners ceased to send their sons abroad for education and more and more ceased to send them to college in the North; ... in short, the South closed door after door through which the thought of mankind had passed and became by its own desire a forbidden region.

He saw with a simple heart and a spacious mind the frontiersman, the hunter, the trapper, the whaler and the sailor, the farmer and the fisherman, the lumberer and the pioneer who were building a world fo Americans to find a home in. Through the opening years of the 19th century Audubon haunted the frontiers that encircled the centres of culture and their men of thought.

The South in 1800 was a land of contrasts, of opulence and squalor, ignorance and learning, of exquisite gardens bordering on Amazonian swamps, fine mansions, beggarly taverns and roads that were rivers. One often met some great lady on a progress through the woods, drawn through the mud by four horses, seated in a splendid coach, made perhaps in London, and followed by a train by magnificently liveried servants.