His character was like the bark of the cinnamon, a rough and astringent
rind without, and an intense sweetness within. Those who penetrated below
the surface found a genial temper, warm affections, and a heart with ample
place for his friends, their pursuits, their good name, their welfare.
They found him a philanthropist, though not precisely after the fashion of
the day; a religious man, most devout where devotion is most apt to be a
feeling rather than a custom, in the household circle; hospitable, and to
the extent of his means liberal-handed in acts of charity. They found,
also, that though in general he would as soon have thought of giving up an
old friend as of giving up an opinion, he was not proof against testimony,
and could part with a mistaken opinion as one parts with an old friend who
has been proved faithless and unworthy. In short, Cooper was one of those
who, to be loved, must be intimately known.

Of his literary character I have spoken largely in the narrative of his
life, but there are yet one or two remarks which must be made to do it
justice. In that way of writing in which he excelled, it seems to me that
he united, in a pre-eminent degree, those qualities which enabled him to
interest the largest number of readers. He wrote not for the fastidious,
the over-refined, the morbidly delicate; for these find in his genius
something too robust for their liking--something by which their
sensibilities are too rudely shaken; but he wrote for mankind at
large--for men and women in the ordinary healthful state of feeling--and
in their admiration he found his reward. It is for this class that public
libraries are obliged to provide themselves with an extraordinary number
of copies of his works: the number in the Mercantile Library in this city,
I am told, is forty. Hence it is, that he has earned a fame, wider, I
think, than any author of modern times--wider, certainly, than any author,
of any age, ever enjoyed in his lifetime. All his excellences are
translatable--they pass readily into languages the least allied in their
genius to that in which he wrote, and in them he touches the heart and
kindles the imagination with the same power as in the original English.

Cooper was not wholly without humor; it is sometimes found lurking in the
dialogue of Harvey Birch, and of Leatherstocking but it forms no
considerable element in his works; and if it did, it would have stood in
the way of his universal popularity;