Like Irving, fortunate in the enjoyment of a wide European reputation, but less fortunate than he in securing the undivided hearts of his countrymen,—whose early history, aboriginal legends, forest scenery, and naval characters he has so well tapestried in novels, essay, biography, and history,—JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, born in 1789, has, by his sea tales, caused many a mother’s heart to yearn after her runaway boy, and by his land stories, garnered up many of our best sheaves of fiction into a national stack. As we gaze on his large, square, massive forehead, we forget his sharply feathered arrows, aimed at our national faults, which generally, of course, missed the conscience and touched only the liver. Remembering “The Pioneers,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “The Spy,” “Pilot,” and “Red Rover,” we fall to blessing the creations which stalk over our rough fences, and brush away our raw villages, uproarious with faces of civilized red-men, and so endeavor to get by, as boys do a haunted place at nightfall, the recollection of those twenty-two libel suits, whose damages he found, like most plaintiffs in that species of legal fiction, to end in the payment of the costs out of his own pocket. Others there are, too, whose physiognomies recall to us pleasantly the explorers in science, workers amid Nature’s secrets, earlier than those who now push their daring way into her very robing-room: BENJAMIN SILLIMAN, the elder, who came in 1779, and through a long life lectured so many into the pleasant idea that they knew something of geology and chemistry, and through his “Journal of Science,” established in 1818, gathered up the mental products of his fellow-harvesters; ROBERT HARE, two years younger, who, at the age of twenty, invented the compound blow-pipe, and up to his death, in 1858, continued his discoveries, until he left, by his spiritual explorations, his scientific brethren behind him; and BENJAMIN RUSH, born in 1780, who by his tasteful style, made boluses less distasteful, and even gave the muses such a draught that they became delirious over his medical pages. WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT, reserved until nearly the close of the eighteenth century ere he was born, and becoming blind in outward vision at the age of eighteen, so clarified his inner sight and quickened it to the perception of new beauties, and so perfected himself by the grace, gentleness, and cheerful gayety of a happy nature, that Peru, Mexico, the times of Ferdinand, Isabella, and Philip II., filtrated through them, glow in splendor and are inwrought and outwrought in such delicacy of color and such noble boldness as to make him stand out in singularly beautiful proportions to thousands of loving eyes, that have never rested, and will now never rest, upon his fine classic head.