f MS.
materials for a biographical history of Great Britain and Ireland.

COOPER, JAMES FENIMORE (1789-1851), American novelist, was born at
Burlington, New Jersey, on the 15th of September 1789. Reared in the
wild country round Otsego Lake, N.Y., on the yet unsettled estates of
his father, a judge and member of Congress, he was sent to school at
Albany and at New Haven, and entered Yale College in his fourteenth
year, remaining for some time the youngest student on the rolls. Three
years afterwards he joined the United States navy; but after making a
voyage or two in a merchant vessel, to perfect himself in seamanship,
and obtaining his lieutenancy, he married and resigned his commission
(1811). He settled in Westchester county, N.Y., the "Neutral Ground" of
his earliest American romance, and produced anonymously (1820) his first
book, _Precaution_, a novel of the fashionable school. This was followed
(1821) by _The Spy_, which was very successful at the date of issue;
_The Pioneers_ (1823), the first of the "Leatherstocking" series; and
_The Pilot_ (1824), a bold and dashing sea-story. The next was _Lionel
Lincoln_ (1825), a feeble and unattractive work; and this was succeeded
in 1826 by the famous _Last of the Mohicans_, a book that is often
quoted as its author's masterpiece. Quitting America for Europe he
published at Paris _The Prairie_ (1826), the best of his books in nearly
all respects, and _The Red Rover_, (1828), by no means his worst.

At this period the unequal and uncertain talent of Cooper would seem to
have been at its best. These excellent novels were, however, succeeded
by one very inferior, _The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish_ (1829); by _The
Notions of a Travelling Bachelor_ (1828), an uninteresting book; and by
_The Waterwitch_ (1830), one of the poorest of his many sea-stories. In
1830 he entered the lists as a party writer, defending in a series of
letters to the _National_, a Parisian journal, the United States against
a string of charges brought against them by the _Revue Britannique_; and
for the rest of his life he continued skirmishing in print, sometimes
for the national interest, sometimes for that of the individual, and not
infrequently for both at once. This opportunity of making a political
confession of faith appears not only to have fortified him in his own
convictions, but to have inspired him with the idea of imposing them on
the public through the medium of his art. His next three nove