ood, has stated these facts. Here is another instance: The late
William L. Stone agreed with Mr. Cooper to submit a certain matter of
libel for amicable arbitration, agreeing, in the event of a decision
against him, to pay Mr. Cooper two hundred dollars toward the expenses
he must incur in attending to it. The affair attracted much attention.
Before an ordinary court Mr. Cooper should have received ten thousand
dollars; but he accepted the verdict agreed upon, the referees deciding
without hesitation that he had been grossly wronged by the publication
of which he had complained. After the death of Mr. Stone one of the
principal papers of the city stated that his widow was poor, and had
appealed to Mr. Cooper's generosity for the remission of a fine, which
could be of no importance to a gentleman of his liberal fortune, but had
been answered with a rude refusal. The statement was entirely and in all
respects false, and it was indignantly contradicted upon the authority
of President Wayland, the brother of Mrs. Stone; but the editors who
gave it currency have never retracted it, and it yet swells the tide of
miserable defamation which makes up the bad reputations of so many of
the purest of men. Numerous other instances might be quoted to show not
only the injustice with which Mr. Cooper has been treated, but the
addiction of the press to libel, and its unwillingness to atone for
wrongs it has itself inflicted.

It used to be the custom of the _North American Review_ to speak of Mr.
Cooper's works as "translated into French," as if thus giving the
highest existing evidence of their popularity, while there was not a
language in Europe into which they did not all, after the publication of
The Red Rover appear almost as soon as they were printed in London. He
has been the chosen companion of the prince and the peasant, on the
borders of the Volga, the Danube, and the Guadalquivir; by the Indus and
the Ganges, the Paraguay and the Amazon; where the name even of
Washington was never spoken, and our country is known only as the home
of Cooper. The world has living no other writer whose fame is so
universal.

Mr. Cooper has the faculty of giving to his pictures an astonishing
reality. They are not mere transcripts of nature, though as such they
would possess extraordinary merit, but actual creations, embodying the
very spirit of intelligent and genial experience and observation. His
Indians, notwithstanding all that has been wr