James Fenimore Cooper | Page 3

refuge of the deer; but
they were also the haunt of the wildcat, the wolf, and the bear. All these
characteristics of his early home made deep impression upon a nature
fond of adventure, and keenly susceptible to the charm of scenery.
When afterward in the first flush of his fame Cooper set out to revive
the memory of the days of the pioneers, he said that he might have
chosen for his subject happier periods, more interesting events, and
possibly more beauteous scenes, but he could not have taken any that
would lie so close to his heart. The man, indeed, never forgot what had
been dear to the boy; and to the spot where his earliest years were spent
he returned to pass the latter part of his life.
The original settlement, moreover, was composed of a more than
usually singular mixture of the motley crowd that always throngs to the
American frontier. The shock of convulsions in lands far distant
reached even to the highland valley shut in by the Otsego hills.
Representatives of almost every nationality in Christendom and
believers in almost every creed, found in it an asylum or a home. Into
this secluded haven drifted men whose lives had been wrecked in the
political storms that were then shaking Europe. Frenchmen, Dutchmen,
Germans, and Poles, came and tarried for a longer or shorter time. Here
Talleyrand, then an exile, spent several days with Cooper's father, and,

true to national instinct, wrote, according to local tradition,
complimentary verses, still preserved, on Cooper's sister. An ex-captain
of the British army was one of the original merchants of the place. An
ex-governor of Martinique was for a time the village (p. 006) grocer.
But the prevailing element in the population were the men of New
England, born levelers of the forest, the greatest wielders of the axe the
world has ever known. Over the somewhat wild and turbulent
democracy, made up of materials so diverse, the original proprietor
reigned a sort of feudal lord, rather by moral qualities than by any
conceded right.
Cooper's early instruction was received in the village school, carried on
in a building erected in 1795, and rejoicing in the somewhat pretentious
name of the Academy. The country at that time, however, furnished
few facilities for higher education anywhere; on the frontier there were
necessarily none. Accordingly Cooper was early sent to Albany. There
he entered the family of the rector of St. Peter's Church, and became,
with three or four other boys, one of his private pupils. This gentleman,
the son of an English clergyman, and himself a graduate of an English
university, had made his ways to these western wilds with a fair
amount of classical learning, with thorough methods of study, and as it
afterwards turned out, Cooper tells us, with another man's wife. This
did not, however, prevent him from insisting upon the immense
superiority of the mother-country in morals as well as manners. A man
of ability and marked character, he clearly exerted over the
impressionable mind of his pupil a greater influence than the latter ever
realized. He was in many respects, indeed, a typical Englishman of the
educated class of that time. He had the profoundest contempt for
republics and republican institutions. The American Revolution he
looked upon as only a little less monstrous than the French, which was
the sum of all iniquities. Connection with any other church than his
own was to be shunned, not at all (p. 007) because it was unchristian,
but because it was ungentlemanly and low. But whatever his opinions
and prejudices were, in the almost absolute dearth then existing in this
country of even respectable scholarship, the opportunity to be under his
instruction was a singular advantage. Unfortunately it did not continue
as long as it was desirable. In 1802 he died. It had been the intention to

fit Cooper to enter the junior class of Yale College; that project had
now to be abandoned. Accordingly he became, at the beginning of the
second term of its freshman year, a member of the class which was
graduated in 1806. He was then but a mere boy of thirteen, and with the
exception of the poet Hillhouse, two weeks his junior, was the youngest
student in the college.
Cooper himself informs us that he played all his first year, and implies
that he did little study during those which followed. To a certain extent
the comparative excellence of his preparation turned out a disadvantage;
the rigid training he had received enabled him to accomplish without
effort what his fellow-students found difficult. Scholarship was at so
low an ebb that the ability to scan Latin was looked upon as a high
accomplishment; and he himself asserts that the class to which he
belonged