which itself has stabbed.
For a few years after Mr. Cooper's return from Europe, he was repeatedly urged by his friends to put a stop to the libels of newspapers by an appeal to the law; but he declined. He perhaps supposed that the common sense of the people would sooner or later discover and right the wrong that was done to him by those who, without the slightest justification, invaded the sacredest privacies of his life for subjects of public observation. He finally decided, at the end of five years after his return, to appeal to the tribunals, in every case in which any thing not by himself submitted to public criticism, in his works, should be offensively treated, within the limits of the state of New-York. Some twenty suits were brought by him, and his course was amply vindicated by unanimous verdicts in his behalf. But the very conduct to which the press had compelled him was made a cause of ungenerous prejudices. He has never objected to the widest latitude or extremest severity in criticisms of his writings, but simply contended that the author should be let alone. With him, individually, the public had nothing to do. In the case of a public officer, slanders may be lived down, but a literary man, in his retirement, has no such means of vindication; his only appeal is to the laws, and if they afford no protection in such cases, the name of law is contemptible.
I enter here upon no discussion of the character of the late Commander Slidell Mackenzie, but observe simply that no one can read Mr. Cooper's volume upon the battle of Lake Erie and retain a very profound respect for that person's sagacity or sincerity. The proprietors of the copyright of Mr. Cooper's abridged Naval History offered it, without his knowledge, to John C. Spencer, then Secretary of the State of New-York, for the school libraries of which that officer had the selection. Mr. Spencer replied with peculiar brevity that he would have nothing to do with such a partisan performance, but soon after directed the purchase of Commander Mackenzie's Life of Commodore Perry, which was entirely and avowedly partisan, while Mr. Cooper's book was rigidly impartial. Commander Mackenzie returned the favor by hanging the Secretary's son. A circumstance connected with this event illustrates what we have said of obtaining justice from the newspapers. A month before Commander Mackenzie's return to New-York in the Somers, Mr. Cooper sent to me, for publication in a magazine of which I was editor, an examination of certain statements in the Life of Perry; but after it was in type, hearing of the terrible mistake which Mackenzie had made, he chose to suffer a continuation of injustice rather than strike a fallen enemy, and so directed the suppression of his criticism. Nevertheless, as the statements in the Life of Perry very materially affected his own reputation, in the following year, when the natural excitement against Mackenzie had nearly subsided, he gave his answer to the press, and was immediately accused in a "leading journal of the country" of having in its preparation devoted himself, from the date of that person's misfortune, to his injury. The reader supposes, of course, that the slander was contradicted as generally as it had been circulated, and that justice was done to the forbearance and delicacy with which Mr. Cooper had acted in the matter; but to this day, neither the journal in which he was assailed, nor one in a hundred of those which repeated the falsehood, has stated these facts. Here is another instance: The late William L. Stone agreed with Mr. Cooper to submit a certain matter of libel for amicable arbitration, agreeing, in the event of a decision against him, to pay Mr. Cooper two hundred dollars toward the expenses he must incur in attending to it. The affair attracted much attention. Before an ordinary court Mr. Cooper should have received ten thousand dollars; but he accepted the verdict agreed upon, the referees deciding without hesitation that he had been grossly wronged by the publication of which he had complained. After the death of Mr. Stone one of the principal papers of the city stated that his widow was poor, and had appealed to Mr. Cooper's generosity for the remission of a fine, which could be of no importance to a gentleman of his liberal fortune, but had been answered with a rude refusal. The statement was entirely and in all respects false, and it was indignantly contradicted upon the authority of President Wayland, the brother of Mrs. Stone; but the editors who gave it currency have never retracted it, and it yet swells the tide of miserable defamation which makes up the bad reputations of so many of the purest of men. Numerous other instances might be quoted to show not only the injustice with which Mr. Cooper has been treated, but the addiction of the press to libel, and its unwillingness to atone for wrongs it has itself inflicted.
It used to be the custom of the North American Review to speak of Mr. Cooper's works as "translated into French," as if thus giving the highest existing evidence of their popularity, while there was not a language in Europe into which they did not all, after the publication of The Red Rover appear almost as soon as they were printed in London. He has been the chosen companion of the prince and the peasant, on the borders of the Volga, the Danube, and the Guadalquivir; by the Indus and the Ganges, the Paraguay and the Amazon; where the name even of Washington was never spoken, and our country is known only as the home of Cooper. The world has living no other writer whose fame is so universal.
Mr. Cooper has the faculty of giving to his pictures an astonishing reality. They are not mere transcripts of nature, though as such they would possess extraordinary merit, but actual creations, embodying the very spirit of intelligent and genial experience and observation. His Indians, notwithstanding all that has been written to the contrary, are no more inferior in fidelity than they are in poetical interest to those of his most successful imitators or rivals. His hunters and trappers have the same vividness and freshness, and in the whole realm of fiction there is nothing more actual, harmonious, and sustained. They evince not only the first order of inventive power, but a profoundly philosophical study of the influences of situation upon human character. He treads the deck with the conscious pride of home and dominion: the aspects of the sea and sky, the terrors of the tornado, the excitement of the chase, the tumult of battle, fire, and wreck, are presented by him with a freedom and breadth of outline, a glow and strength of coloring and contrast, and a distinctness and truth of general and particular conception, that place him far in advance of all the other artists who have attempted with pen or pencil to paint the ocean. The same vigorous originality is stamped upon his nautical characters. The sailors of Smollett are as different in every respect as those of Eugene Sue and Marryat are inferior. He goes on board his ship with his own creations, disdaining all society and assistance but that with which he is thus surrounded. Long Tom Coffin, Tom Tiller, Trysail, Bob Yarn, the boisterous Nightingale, the mutinous Nighthead, the fierce but honest Boltrope, and others who crowd upon our memories, as familiar as if we had ourselves been afloat with them, attest the triumph of this self-reliance. And when, as if to rebuke the charge of envy that he owed his successes to the novelty of his scenes and persons, he entered upon fields which for centuries had been illustrated by the first geniuses of Europe, his abounding power and inspiration were vindicated by that series of political novels ending with The Bravo, which have the same supremacy in their class that is held by The Pilot and The Red Rover among stories of the sea. It has been urged that his leading characters are essentially alike, having no difference but that which results from situation. But this opinion will not bear investigation. It evidently arose from the habit of clothing his heroes alike with an intense individuality, which under all circumstances sustains the sympathy they at first awaken, without the aid of those accessories to which artists of less power are compelled to resort. Very few authors have added more than one original and striking character to the world of imagination; none has added more than Cooper; and his are all as distinct and actual as the personages that stalk before us on the stage of history.
To be American, without falling into Americanism, is the true task that is set before the native artist in literature, the accomplishment of which awaits the reward of the best approval in these times, and the promise of an enduring name. Some of our authors, fascinated very excusably with the faultless models of another age, have declined this condition, and have given us Spectators and Tattlers with false dates, and developed a style of composition of which the very merits imply an anachronism in the proportion of excellence. Others have understood the result to be attained better than the means of arriving at it. They have not considered the difference between those peculiarities in our society, manners, tempers, and tastes, which are genuine and characteristic, and those which are merely defects and errors upon the English system; they have acquired the force and gayety of liberty, but not the dignity of independence, and are only provincial, when they hoped to be national. Mr. Cooper has been more happy than any other writer in reconciling these repugnant qualities,
