s, but simply contended that the author should
be let alone. With him, individually, the public had nothing to do. In
the case of a public officer, slanders may be lived down, but a literary
man, in his retirement, has no such means of vindication; his only
appeal is to the laws, and if they afford no protection in such cases,
the name of law is contemptible.

I enter here upon no discussion of the character of the late Commander
Slidell Mackenzie, but observe simply that no one can read Mr. Cooper's
volume upon the battle of Lake Erie and retain a very profound respect
for that person's sagacity or sincerity. The proprietors of the
copyright of Mr. Cooper's abridged Naval History offered it, without his
knowledge, to John C. Spencer, then Secretary of the State of New-York,
for the school libraries of which that officer had the selection. Mr.
Spencer replied with peculiar brevity that he would have nothing to do
with such a partisan performance, but soon after directed the purchase
of Commander Mackenzie's Life of Commodore Perry, which was entirely and
avowedly partisan, while Mr. Cooper's book was rigidly impartial.
Commander Mackenzie returned the favor by hanging the Secretary's son. A
circumstance connected with this event illustrates what we have said of
obtaining justice from the newspapers. A month before Commander
Mackenzie's return to New-York in the Somers, Mr. Cooper sent to me, for
publication in a magazine of which I was editor, an examination of
certain statements in the Life of Perry; but after it was in type,
hearing of the terrible mistake which Mackenzie had made, he chose to
suffer a continuation of injustice rather than strike a fallen enemy,
and so directed the suppression of his criticism. Nevertheless, as the
statements in the Life of Perry very materially affected his own
reputation, in the following year, when the natural excitement against
Mackenzie had nearly subsided, he gave his answer to the press, and was
immediately accused in a "leading journal of the country" of having in
its preparation devoted himself, from the date of that person's
misfortune, to his injury. The reader supposes, of course, that the
slander was contradicted as generally as it had been circulated, and
that justice was done to the forbearance and delicacy with which Mr.
Cooper had acted in the matter; but to this day, neither the journal in
which he was assailed, nor one in a hundred of those which repeated the
falseh