. Accordingly Cooper was early
sent to Albany. There he entered the family of the rector of St.
Peter's Church, and became, with three or four other boys, one of his
private pupils. This gentleman, the son of an English clergyman, and
himself a graduate of an English university, had made his ways to
these western wilds with a fair amount of classical learning, with
thorough methods of study, and as it afterwards turned out, Cooper
tells us, with another man's wife. This did not, however, prevent him
from insisting upon the immense superiority of the mother-country in
morals as well as manners. A man of ability and marked character, he
clearly exerted over the impressionable mind of his pupil a greater
influence than the latter ever realized. He was in many respects,
indeed, a typical Englishman of the educated class of that time. He
had the profoundest contempt for republics and republican institutions.
The American Revolution he looked upon as only a little less monstrous
than the French, which was the sum of all iniquities. Connection with
any other church than his own was to be shunned, not at all (p. 007)
because it was unchristian, but because it was ungentlemanly and low.
But whatever his opinions and prejudices were, in the almost absolute
dearth then existing in this country of even respectable scholarship,
the opportunity to be under his instruction was a singular advantage.
Unfortunately it did not continue as long as it was desirable. In 1802
he died. It had been the intention to fit Cooper to enter the junior
class of Yale College; that project had now to be abandoned.
Accordingly he became, at the beginning of the second term of its
freshman year, a member of the class which was graduated in 1806. He
was then but a mere boy of thirteen, and with the exception of the
poet Hillhouse, two weeks his junior, was the youngest student in the
college.

Cooper himself informs us that he played all his first year, and
implies that he did little study during those which followed. To a
certain extent the comparative excellence of his preparation turned
out a disadvantage; the rigid training he had received enabled him to
accomplish without effort what his fellow-students found difficult.
Scholarship was at so low an ebb that the ability to scan Latin was
looked upon as a high accomplishment; and he himself asserts that the
class to which he belonged was the first in Yale College that had ever
tried it. This may