Later Greenough wrote:  “Fenimore Cooper saved me from despair after my return to Italy.  He employed me as I wish to be employed; and up to this moment has been a father to me.”  Greenough’s last work was a bust of his illustrious friend, the American novelist, which he proposed to cast in bronze, at his own expense, and place in the field where stands the Old Mill in Newport, and where the opening scene of “The Red Rover” is laid.  He took counsel with Cooper’s friends as to a monument to the author, and among his papers was found an elaborate design for the work.

[Illustration:  HORATIO GREENOUGH.]

Cooper loved to encourage rising talent in young artists.  He gave them orders, and also his cheering sympathy.  One of these wrote that Cooper gave him a free letter-of-credit on his banker in Paris, and added:  “I had occasion to use it more than once, and my drafts were always cheerfully accepted.  Since then I have paid him, though he never would have asked for the money; nobody but he and I ever knew of the transaction.”  A Boston man writes of his visit to the Florence studio of Greenough:  “My eye fell upon a bust which awakened sea and forest pictures,—­the spars of an elegant craft, the lofty figure of a hunter, the dignified bearing of a mysterious pilot.”  It was the bust of Fenimore Cooper.  Of the sculptor it was noted that “he always referred with emotion to the gleam of sunshine which encouraged him at this crisis, in the friendship of our late renowned novelist, Cooper.”

[Illustration:  BUST OF JAMES FENIMORE COOPER.]

In the Pitti one day they passed before Raphael’s Madonna del Trono, and the sculptor pointed out to his companion the fine drawing in the two little angel figures of the foreground, in the act of singing.  Cooper asked if the subject would not lend itself to sculpture; afterwards one of his daughters copied the figures, and the result of the mutual interest in the design was an order from Cooper for a group which in a few months Greenough executed in marble.  It was exhibited in America under the title of “The Chanting Cherubs.”  It was Cooper’s “Chanting Cherubs”—­the first group of its kind from an American chisel —­that led to Greenough’s order for the statue of Washington, and inspired the pen of Richard Henry Dana to write: 

    Whence came ye, cherubs? from the moon? 
      Or from some shining star? 
    Ye, sure, are sent a blessed boon,
      From kinder worlds afar;
    For while I look my heart is all delight: 
    Earth hath no creatures half so pure and bright.

[Illustration:  CHANTING CHERUBS.]

Later on Greenough came to them “all booted and bearded beyond recognition” save in “his walk and his talk.”