[Illustration:  JOANNA BAILLIE.]

[Illustration:  SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE.]

With Mr. Southby Cooper went to see Coleridge at Highgate, where, he says, “our reception was frank and friendly, the poet coming out to meet us in his morning-gown.  I rose to take a nearer view of a little picture, when Mr. Coleridge told me it was by his friend Allston.”  From the bard of Highgate they went to see Miss Joanna Baillie at Hampstead, and found her “a little, quiet woman, a deeply-seated earnestness about her that bespoke the higher impulses within; no one would have thought her little person contained the elements of a tragedy.”

[Illustration:  HOUSE OF THE GILLMAN’S, HIGHGATE, LONDON.]

An Amsterdam engagement for early June called Cooper and his family from London before the end of the season, and prompted him to say, “The force of things has moved heavier bodies.”  Quitting England was by no means easy, but “the weather was fine and the North Sea smooth as a dish.”  They paddled the whole night long in their “solid good vessel, but slow of foot.”  With morning “a low spit of land hove in sight, and a tree or a church tower” rose out of the water,—­this was Holland.  At Rotterdam “the boat was soon alongside the Boom Key.”  With some fluttering about the dykes and windmills of Dutchland, a flight through Belgium soon brought them once more to Paris.

[Illustration:  BOOM KEY AT ROTTERDAM.]

Cooper was a keen observer and a calm critic of both home and foreign folk.  That he was stirred to strong words by unpleasing comments on his country appears in his “Notions of Americans:  Picked up by a Traveling Bachelor.”  This book of facts, showing wide and accurate knowledge, was intended to enlighten and clear away mistakes.  Instead of this, it drew upon its writer critical fire both at home and abroad, and was the first of the many shadows of his after life.  His stories of our new country taught Europe more about America than Europe had ever learned before.  His love for, and faith in, his own country were strong.  Abroad he was a staunch defender of her free institutions, and foreigners deemed him more proud of his American birth than of his literary birthright of genius; and yet, at home he was voted “an enemy of all that the fathers of the Republic fought for.”  However, the opinion of those who knew Cooper best was given by his Bread and Cheese Club friend, Dr. John Wakefield Francis, as,—­“He was an American inside and out—­a thorough patriot.”  It was said that as an aristocratic American he never presented letters of introduction.  Yet in foreign lands his society was sought by the most distinguished men of his time.  However of this, the rare pleasure of these London days he ever held in warm remembrance.

Flying from the summer heat of Paris, the family soon left for Switzerland with a team of sturdy Norman horses, a postilion riding the near beast.  It slipped and fell, rolled over and caught its rider’s leg beneath, but was saved its breaking by the make of his old-fashioned boot, “so with a wry face and a few sacr-r-r-es, he limped back to his saddle.”