stration: Peter Cooper.]

It may be said, without exaggeration, that few men in our time and
country, not occupying official position, have been so widely and
sincerely mourned as the late Peter Cooper. Other men have been as
genuinely good as he, and have founded charitable institutions as
worthy and as useful, in their way, as the one which is to be the
lasting monument to his memory. But Peter Cooper held a place in the
hearts of his fellow-citizens which belonged to him alone. A man, to
outward seeming, in manners and conversation as plain and homespun
as his name, he held unshaken from youth to old age--and to few men
is it allotted to live in uninterrupted health and action to the age
of ninety-two--the confidence, the respect and the affection of all
sorts of people: the rich and the poor, the high and the low, the
learned and the unlearned, people of all parties and of all
religions. Character is the accumulation of little actions, and
makes its deepest impression, of course, when these actions have
been observed by great numbers of people during a long period of
time. The whole of his ninety-two years, with the exception of a
short time passed in his youth in its vicinity, were spent by Mr.
Cooper in the city of New York. It was little more than a country
town when he was born; it was already one of the great cities of the
world when he died; and in all that time he had been associated with
the business enterprises that had helped its growth, as one of the
chief actors.

The fortune that he built up was both earned and expended here; the
manner of its earning was known of all men, but the way in which it
was expended was rather felt than known, for, like all great and
generous benefactors, Mr. Cooper was without ostentation; but as he
gave while he was alive and all the time that he was alive; and as
he gave to the people among whom he lived, and not to outsiders, it
naturally followed that his name, his person, his traits of
character, became, as it were, a common possession to the people of
New York; but few men upon whom such a glare of publicity had fallen
for so many years would have been able to bear the scrutiny so well
as Peter Cooper.

He was born on February 12, 1791, presumably in Little Dock Street,
now Water Street, Coenties Slip, where his father, John Cooper,
carried on the trade of a hatter. His shop was near the store of
John Jacob Astor, from whom he bought the beaver-skins which he made