[From "The Pilot."] "The eye of a man is a sort of a lighthouse to tell one how to steer into the haven of his confidence."

"There is often wisdom in science, but there is sometimes safety in ignorance." "It is a woman's province to be thrifty." [From "The Red Rover."] "Superstition is a quality that seems indigenous to the ocean."

"Life is sweeter than gold."

"The ship which often runs the hazard of the shoals gets wrecked at last."

oughly, it is a great folly to spend his breath in words."

"The vulgarest minds are always the most reluctant to confess their blunders."

"Ruins in a land are, like most of the signs of decay in the human form, sad evidences of abuses and passions which have hastened the inroads of time."

"Whole fleets have often been towed to their anchors, and there warped; waiting for wind and tide to serve."

"The world must be often tried and thoroughly known, before we can pretend to judge of the motives of those around us."

"The true secret of the philosopher is not in living forever, but in living while he can."

James Fenimore Cooper, novelist and historian, was born at Burlington, New Jersey, September 15, 1789. Though New Jersey may claim his birthplace, Cooper's childhood, from his second to his fourteenth year, was passed on the then frontiers of civilization, at Cooperstown, New York, on the Susquehanna. There, in the primeval forest, hard by the broad Lake Otsego and the wide-flowing river, his father, Judge William Cooper, built his house known as Otsego Hall and then laid out the town-a town that spread over extensive tracts of land all his own.

Here young Cooper began his life, with a forest around him and stretching up the mountains, full of wild animals, and wild men, Indian and white. All these nursed him and implanted in him seeds of poetry and wrought into the sturdy fibres of his mind golden threads of creative imagination. Then round about the hearth at night, men of pith and character told tales of the Revolution, of battle, adventure, and endurance which the child, hearing, fed upon with his soul, and grew strong in patriotism and independ

ence.

tion at the village school, and, later, was sent to Albany where he was fitted for college. In 1802 he entered Yale, but, in his junior year, was dismissed for a breech of discipline.

Deciding to enter the United States Navy, he shipped as a sailor before the mast on a merchant vessel (plying between New York and Europe) by way of preparation. The navy offered prospects of advancement to him because his father had been a representative in Congress and was a leading Federalist. In 1808 he was regularly entered as a midshipman of the United States Navy and was detailed to service on Lakes Ontario and Champlain, thus gaining familiarity with scenes subsequently portrayed in his novels. His aptness in this arduous school may be judged from the technical accuracy that characterizes his marine stories. He rose to the rank of lieutenant. In 1811 he married a sister of Bishop De Lancey, of Westchester County, New York, and domestic joys far outweighed with him. the chances of warlike distinction. He therefore resigned his commission and settled down as a gentleman farmer which he continued to be

From 1814 to 1817 he resided at Cooperstown, but in 1817 he made his home at Scarsdale, Westchester Co., N. Y. In 1820 appeared his first book, " Precaution," written partly as an experiment because of his disappointment on reading a novel treating of English society, and his belief that he could write a better one. The book was published anonymously and attracted but little attention either in the United States or in England.

His friends, learning of his venture, urged him to depict American scenes and, as a result, he wrote "The Spy" and published it in 1821. It received such high praise on both continents that, in 1823, he wrote and published "The Pioneers," the first of his famous Leather-Stocking Tales. In 1824 appeared "The Pilot," the first sea-story, properly speaking, ever written. This work established his fame as a writer of sea stories. In France and Germany he was considered equal if not su

perior to Walter Scott. In 1826 he sailed for Europe and remained abroad until 1833. For a portion of this period he was acting United States consul at Lyons.

With the publication of "The Water Witch" (1830) the most fortunate decade of Cooper's life closed. A decline in popularity followed, owing to a change in general literary taste, to certain political opinions championed by him, and to severe strictures on American and English life and traits made in his books of travel (1836-38) and in later works.

He was slandered and ridiculed by American newspapers and finally brought suits of libel in which he defended himself with great ability, pleading his own cases and winning them. The most important of his suits related to the fairness of his "History of the Navy of the United States" (1839), which was estab lished by the proceedings. He died of dropsy, September 14, 1851, at his home at Cooperstown.

"More than a century ago, in the town of Burlington, New Jersey, was born a man destined to become one of the best known figures of his time. He was as devout an American as ever lived, for he could arraign the shortcomings of his countrymen as stanchly as he could defend and glorify their ideals. He entered as fearlessly and passionately into the life around him, seeing intensely, yet sometimes blindly, feeling ardently, yet not always aright; acting with might and conviction, yet not seldom amiss. He loved and revered good, scorned and hated evil, and, with the strength and straightforwardness of a bull, championed the one and gored the other. He worshipped justice, but lacked judgment; his brain stubborn and logical, was incongruously mated with a deep and tender heart.

"A brave and burly backwoods gentleman was he, with a smattering of the humanities from Yale, and a dogged precision of principle and conduct from six years in the navy. He had the iron memory proper to a vigorous organization and a serious, observant mind; he was tirelessly industrious-in nine-andtwenty years he published thirty-two novels, many of them of prodigious length, besides producing much matter never brought to light. His birth fell at a noble period of our history and his surroundings fostered true and generous manhood. Doubtless many of his contemporaries were as true men as he; but to Cooper, in addition was vouchsafed the gift of genius; and that magic quality dominated and transfigured his else rugged and intractable nature, and made his name known and loved over all the earth. ..

"Nobility was innate in him; he conceived lofty and sweet ideals of human nature and conduct, and was never false to them. The

ideal man, the ideal woman-he believed in them to the end and more than twice or thrice in his fictions we find personages like Harvey Birch, Leatherstocking, Long Tom Coffin, the jailor's daughter in The Bravo,' and Mabel Dunham and Dew-of-June in 'The Pathfinder,' which give adequate embodiment to his exalted conception of the possibilities of his fellow creatures.

"Perhaps he hardly appreciated at its value that one immortal thing about him, -his genius, and was too much concerned about his dogmatic and bull-headed self. Unless the world confessed his infallibility, he could not quite be at peace with it. . . . He was uncompromisingly serious on all subjects, or, if at times, he tried to be playful, we shudder and avert our faces. It is too like Juggernaut dancing a jig. He gave too much weight to the verdict of the moment, and not enough to that judgment of posterity to which the great Verulam was content to submit his fame. Cooper, in short, had his limitations, but with all his errors, we may take him and be thankful.

"Moreover, his essential largeness appears in the fact that in the midst of his bitterest conflicts, at the very moment when his pamphlets and satires,' were heating the printing-presses and people's tempers, a novel of his would be issued, redolent with pure and serene imagination, telling of the prairies and the woods, of deer and panther, of noble redskins and heroic trappers. It is another world, harmonious and calm; no echo of the petty tumults in which its author seemed to live is audible therein. But it is a world of that author's imagination, and its existence proves that he was greater and wiser than the man of troubles and grievances who so noisily solicits our attention. The surface truculence which fought and wrangled was distinct from the interior en

ergy which created and harmonized, and acted perhaps as the safety-valve to relieve the inward region from disturbance.

"Cooper was hated as well as loved during his lifetime, but, at his death, the love had quenched the hate, and there are none but lovers of him now. He was manly, sincere, sensitive, independent; rough without but sweet within. He sought the good of others, he devoutly believed in God, and, if he was always ready to take his own part in a fight, he never forgot his own self-respect or forfeited other men's. America has produced no other man built on a scale so continental."-Julian Hawthorne, in "The World's Best Literature."

64 His character was like the bark of the cinnamon,- —a rough and a stringent rind without, and an intense sweetness within. Those who penetrated below the surface found a genial temper, warm affections and a heart with ample place for his friends, their pursuits, their good name, their welfare. They found him a philanthropist.”— William Cullen Bryant.

II. His Novels.

1. THE SPY," 1821.

"The earlier works of every national literature must always possess an interest peculiar to themselves, and naturally connected with the period to which they belong. This interest may fairly be claimed for 'The Spy,' a tale of the neutral ground, the first brilliantly successful romance published in America."-Atlantic Monthly.

"It is said that if you cast a pebble into the ocean at the mouth of our harbor, the vibration made in the water passes gradually on till it strikes the icy barriers of the deep at the south pole. The spread of Cooper's reputation is not confined within narrower limits. The Spy' is read in all the written dialects of Europe and in some of those of Asia. The French, immediately after its first appearance, gave it to the multitudes who read their far diffused language, and placed it among the first works of its class. It was rendered into Castilian, and passed into the hands of those who dwell under the beams of the Southern Cross. At length it passed the eastern frontier of Europe, and the latest record I have seen of its progress toward universality is contained in a statement of the International Magazine, derived, I presume, from its author, that in 1847 it was published in a Persian translation at Ispahan. Before this time, I doubt not, they are reading it in some of the languages of Hindostan and, if the Chinese ever translated anything, it would be in the

hands of the many millions who inhabit the far Cathay."-William Cullen Bryant.

"The Spy' is not a perfect work of art; but it is a story of adventure and character such as the world loves and will never tire of. This book reveals unquestionable gen. ius. The nation's criticism was to buy the book and read it, and they and other nations have been doing so ever since. The incidents are so many and the complications so ingenious that one forgets the detail after a few years, and comes to the perusal with fresh appetite."—Julian Hawthorne.

.

2. THE PILOT," 1823.

"In this book the resources of the writer's invention first appear in full development.

It is generally accepted as the best sea-story ever written."-Julian Hawthorne.

"In this work Cooper has had many disciples, but no rival. All who have since written romances of the sea have been but travelers in a country of which he was the great discoverer, and none of them all seemed to love a ship as Cooper loved it, or have been able so strongly to interest all classes of readers in its fortunes. Among other personages drawn with great strength in The Pilot' is the general favorite, Tom Coffin, with all the virtues and one or two of the infirmities of his profession, superstitious as seamen are apt to be, yet whose superstitions strike us as but an irregular growth of his devout recognition of the Power who holds the ocean in the hollow of His hand; true hearted, gentle, full of resources, collected in danger, and at last calmly perishing at the post of duty, with the vessel he has long guided, by what I may call a great and magnaminous death."William Cullen Bryant.

3. "THE PIONEER," 1823.

"In 1823, and in his thirty-fourth year Cooper brought out his 'Pioneers,' the scene of which was laid on the borders of his own beautiful lake. . . . In the Pioneers,' Leatherstocking is first introduced—a philosopher of the woods ignorant of books, but instructed in all that nature, without the aid of science, could reveal to the man of quick senses and inquiring intellect, whose life has been passed under the open sky, and in companionship with a race whose animal perceptions are the acutest and most cultivated of which there is any example. But Leatherstocking has higher qualities. him there is a genial blending of the gentlest virtues of the civilized man with the better nature of the aboriginal tribes. All that in them is noble, generous and ideal, is adopt

In