" said a barrister to me, "since the days of Emmet."

Cooper behaved liberally towards his antagonists, so far as pecuniary
damages were concerned, though some of them wholly escaped their payment
by bankruptcy. After, I believe, about, six years of litigation, the
newspaper press gradually subsided into a pacific disposition towards its
adversary, and the contest closed with the account of pecuniary profit and
loss, so far as he was concerned, nearly balanced. The occasion of these
suits was far from honorable to those who provoked them, but the result
was I had almost said, creditable to all parties; to him, as the
courageous prosecutor, to the administration of justice in this country,
and to the docility of the newspaper press, which he had disciplined into
good manners.

It was while he was in the midst of these litigations, that he published,
in 1840, the _Pathfinder_. People had begun to think of him as a
controversialist, acute, keen, and persevering, occupied with his personal
wrongs and schemes of attack and defence. They were startled from this
estimate of his character by the moral duty of that glorious work--I must
so call it; by the vividness and force of its delineations, by the
unspoiled love of nature apparent in every page, and by the fresh and warm
emotions which everywhere gave life to the narrative and the dialogue.
Cooper was now in his fifty-first year, but nothing which he had produced
in the earlier part of his literary life was written with so much of what
might seem the generous fervor of youth, or showed the faculty of
invention in higher vigor. I recollect that near the time of its
appearance I was informed of an observation made upon it by one highly
distinguished in the literature of our country and of the age, between
whom and the author an unhappy coolness had for some years existed. As he
finished the reading of the Pathfinder, he exclaimed, "They may say what
they will of Cooper; the man who wrote this book is not only a great man,
but a good man."

The readers of the _Pathfinder_ were quickly reconciled to the fourth
appearance of Leatherstocking, when they saw him made to act a different
part from any which the author had hitherto assigned him--when they saw
him shown as a lover, and placed in the midst of associations which
invested his character with a higher and more affecting heroism. In this
work are two female characters, portrayed in a masterly manner,--the
corporal's daught