labors during these twenty-nine years.  We must add five volumes of naval history and biography, ten volumes of travels and sketches in Europe, and a large amount of occasional and controversial writings, most of which is now hidden away in that huge wallet wherein Time puts his alms for Oblivion.  His literary productions other than his novels would alone be enough to save him from the reproach of idleness.  In estimating a writer’s claims to honor and remembrance, the quantity as well as the quality of his work should surely be taken into account; and in summing up the case of our great novelist to the jury of posterity, this point should be strongly put.

Cooper’s first novel, “Precaution,” was published when he was in his thirty-first year.  It owed its existence to an accident, and was but an ordinary production, as inferior to the best of his subsequent works as Byron’s “Hours of Idleness” to “Childe Harold.”  It was a languid and colorless copy of exotic forms:  a mere scale picked from the surface of the writer’s mind, with neither beauty nor vital warmth to commend it.  We speak from the vague impressions which many long years have been busy in effacing; and we confess that it would require the combined forces of a long voyage and a scanty library to constrain us to the task of reading it anew.

And yet, such as it was, it made a certain impression at the time of its appearance.  The standard by which it was tried was very unlike that which would now be applied to it:  there was all the difference between the two that there is between strawberries in December and strawberries in June.  American literature was then just beginning to “glint forth” like Burns’s mountain daisy, and rear its tender form above the parent earth.  The time had, indeed, gone by—­which a friend of ours, not yet venerable, affirms he can well remember—­when school-boys and collegians, zealous for the honor of indigenous literature, were obliged to cite, by way of illustration, such works as Morse’s Geography and Hannah Adams’s “History of the Jews”; but it was only a faint, crepuscular light, that streaked the east, and gave promise of the coming day.  Irving had just completed his “Sketch-Book,” which was basking in the full sunshine of unqualified popularity.  Dana, in the thoughtful and meditative beauty of “The Idle Man,” was addressing a more limited public.  Percival had just before published a small volume of poems; Halleck’s “Fanny” had recently appeared; and so had a small duodecimo volume by Bryant, containing “The Ages,” and half a dozen smaller poems.  Miss Sedgwick’s “New England Tale” was published about the same time.  But a large proportion of those who are now regarded as our ablest writers were as yet unknown, or just beginning to give sign of what they were.  Dr. Channing was already distinguished as an eloquent and powerful preacher, but the general public had not yet recognized in him that remarkable combination of loftiness of