of the
Court of Common Pleas, then young Alexander Cockburn; and often has my
brother said to me, then about sixteen, when speaking of the above
family, "rely upon it, Billy, young Alexander, if he enter the
profession, will do great things in it; he is a remarkably clever,
energetic, and talented young man." Henry had much of the restlessness
and irritability, the usual accompaniments of a high order of talent,
with great earnestness in diction and action.

Ere I proceed further; the reader will, perhaps, be pleased with a
likeness of the man. I should say, in height, he was about five-feet
eleven-inches; of spare and sinewy frame, with an elastic tread, that
those who knew him, and seeing him in the distance, might truly say, as
Ulysses of Diomede in Shakspeare's play of "Troilus and Cressida,"

"'Tis he, I ken the manner of his gait;
That spirit of his in aspiration lifts him from the earth."

And often have I heard the late Mr. Alderson (the father of the present
judge), who travelled with my father, circuit and sessions as a
provincial barrister, more than thirty years, and who was resident at
Norwich, say,--"that Henry always put him more in mind of a Spirit, that
a man of flesh and blood;" his eye dark, like that of Edmund Kean's, the
great actor, showed every emotion of the soul, now fiery with anger, now
glazed with thought, and anon, melting into softness; his head small, and
finely rounded, and covered with thick clustering curls of black crispy
hair, was such as sculptors have ever loved to give the youthful
Antinous; his forehead retreating was characteristic, as Lavater says,
"of genius;" his nose was slightly arched in the centre and slightly
fleshy near the nostrils; his face oval, with a well defined chin and a
mouth plain, but full of energy and expression, and similar to Sterne's,
the contour, of whose face I always thought my brother's much resembled.
I have thus given, to please the lover of physiognomy, "a shadow
portrait," not "a Myall's photograph," which I hope will not only satisfy
the physiognomist, but which I think they, who but even slightly remember
Henry Cooper, have but to place before the tablet of their memory and
view the shade cast from it with their "mind's eye" to at once recall and
recognize the original. I have thus sketched his likeness, as I regret
to say, thus only can he be now known, or viewed by those who were
unacquainted with him living, as no portrait of him i