It is a misfortune that most men and women who are willing to risk repute for the freedom to think and speak are eccentric in other respects. They are unusual first of all in having minds so independent that they presume to disagree with the majority even in silence. They are more unusual still in having the courage to disagree aloud. When they have said their say, however, their neighbors begin to carp at them, respectable people to pass by on the other side, and the newspapers to distort what they have said and then abuse them for what they never uttered. The honest and truly reckless talkers, stung to the quick, feel injured and innocent, talk extravagantly, rely more and more on their own judgments and less and less on the facts, and sooner or later lose their influence, if they do not become outcasts. In the end they have the courage and honesty with which they started, a few deploring friends, and a thousand enemies who hate them with an honest and totally unjustified hatred. It is a tragic round which all but the most extraordinary of free speakers seem doomed to travel. And Cooper did not escape it. Yet he did have the remarkable strength and good fortune to pass out of this vale of controversy toward the end of his life. With 1842 his campaign against the public ceased--and theirs against him. He spent his last years happily at Cooperstown and slowly returned into an era of good feeling. It was in these later years that Lowell paid him the well-deserved tribute quoted above. He was really a great patriot. If his love of America led him into this sea of troubles, it was the same love that made him the successful writer of a masterly series of American stories. It is the native character of the man that is worth remembering, and the native quality of his books that earned him a wide and lasting fame. BOOK LIST =_Individual Author_= JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. Collected Works. New York. 1854. 33 vols. These have appeared in many later collected and individual editions in America, England, and many other lands and languages. The chief works appeared originally as follows: Precaution, 1820; The Spy, 1821; The Pioneers, 1823; The Pilot, 1823; Lionel Lincoln, 1825; The Last of the Mohicans, 1826; The Prairie, 1827; The Red Rover, 1828; Notions of the Americans, 1828; The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, 1829; The Water-Witch, 1831; The Bravo, 1831; The Heidenmauer, 1832; The Headsman, 1833; The Monikins, 1835; Homeward Bound, 1838; Home as Found, 1838; The Pathfinder, 1840; Mercedes of Castile, 1840; The Deerslayer, 1841; The Two Admirals, 1842; Wing and Wing, 1842; Wyandotte, 1843; Ned Myers, 1843; Afloat and Ashore, 1844; Satanstoe, 1845; The Chain Bearer, 1845; The Redskins, 1846; The Crater, 1847; Jack Tier, 1848; The Oak Openings, 1848; The Sea Lions, 1849; The Ways of the Hour, 1850. =Bibliographies=