James Fenimore Cooper is one of the most interesting characters in the
history of American authorship. Irving, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell,
Holmes, and Hawthorne early in life showed their literary bent, and
lived academic and peaceful careers. They were also popular. Cooper
was thirty years old before he thought of writing, and his life was
embittered by the consciousness that he was the target of the most
bitter criticism, both at home and abroad. Yet not one of the
distinguished authors I have named is more widely known to-day than
Cooper. Matthew Arnold has said somewhere that an author's place in
the future is to be determined by his contemporaneous ranking in
foreign lands. If that is true the names of Mark Twain, Cooper, Walt
Whitman, and Poe will rank high in the annals of posterity, for their
European fame is said to be the most general of any of the American
writers.

There is an appealing fascination about the boyhood days of Cooper.
When James was a babe of fourteen months his father moved to the
headwaters of the Susquehanna. The family consisted of fifteen
persons; James, the future novelist, was the eleventh of twelve
children. Their home was in the midst of the forest. Near by was the
charming lake, Otsego. The father owned several thousand acres, and
was, probably, the most prominent man in that sparsely-settled region.
What boy would want a finer opportunity to indulge all the wild
propensities that lurk in the untamed heart of every healthy
youngster? To roam in the untracked forest, to sail the lake, to hunt,
to fish, to dream of the great unknown world lying just beyond the
sun-tipped trees,--what can the schools give in exchange for this? Is
it surprising that the wholesomeness of the forest and the charm and
freshness of God's out-of-doors found their way into the man's novels,
when so many delightful boyhood experiences must have found their way
into the boy's heart?

As I said, Cooper was thirty years old before he began to write. He
had studied under an Episcopal rector, and was intending to enter the
junior class at Yale; the rector died and Cooper entered the second
term of the freshman class; for some frolic in which he was engaged he
was dismissed; he then entered the navy, where he gathered valuable
experience which he worked afterwards into literature; he married;
resigned, and lived the quiet life of a country gentleman. One day he
threw down an English novel he had been reading and s