in public affairs, and his name appears
in the list of members of the Colonial Legislature for 1681. In 1687, or
subsequent to the establishment of Penn at Philadelphia, he obtained a
grant of land opposite the new city, extending several miles along the
margin of the Delaware and the tributary stream which has since borne
the name of Cooper's Creek. The branch of the family to which the
novelist belongs removed more than a century since into Pennsylvania, in
which state his father was born. He married early, and while a young man
established himself at a hamlet in Burlington county, New Jersey, which
continues to be known by his name, and afterward in the city of
Burlington. Having become possessed of extensive tracts of land on the
border of Otsego Lake, in central New-York, he began the settlement of
his estate there in the autumn of 1785, and in the following spring
erected the first house in Cooperstown. From this time until 1790 Judge
Cooper resided alternately at Cooperstown and Burlington, keeping up an
establishment at both places. James Fenimore Cooper was born at
Burlington on the fifteenth of September, 1789, and in the succeeding
year was carried to the new home of his family, of which he is now
proprietor.

Judge Cooper being a member of the Congress, which then held its
sessions in Philadelphia, his family remained much of the time at
Burlington, where our author, when but six years of age, commenced under
a private tutor of some eminence his classical education. In 1800 he
became an inmate of the family of Rev. Thomas Ellison, Rector of St
Peter's, in Albany, who had fitted for the university three of his elder
brothers, and on the death of that accomplished teacher was sent to New
Haven, where he completed his preparatory studies. He entered Yale
College at the beginning of the second term of 1802. Among his
classmates were John A. Collier, Judge Cushman, and the late Justice
Sutherland of New-York, Judge Bissel of Connecticut, Colonel James
Gadsden of Florida, and several others who afterwards became eminent in
various professions. John C. Calhoun was at the time a resident
graduate, and Judge William Jay of Bedford, who had been his room-mate
at Albany, entered the class below him. The late James A. Hillhouse
originally entered the same class with Mr. Cooper; there was very little
difference in their ages, both having been born in the same month, and
both being much too young to be thrown into the are