Another child who found Fenimore Cooper a most genial friend was Caroline A. Foote, who afterward became Mrs. G. Pomeroy Keese. She was a frequent visitor at Otsego Hall, where the novelist made much of her, and when she was thirteen years old he wrote some original verses in her autograph album, at her request, concluding with these lines: In after life, when thou shalt grow To womanhood, and learn to feel The tenderness the aged know To guide their children's weal, Then wilt thou bless with bended knee Some smiling child as I bless thee. Encouraged by this success, Caroline Foote afterward asked Cooper to write some verses for her schoolmate, Julia Bryant, daughter of William Cullen Bryant, who was a warm friend of the novelist. With his young petitioner by his side Cooper sat at the old desk in the library of Otsego Hall and laughingly dashed off these lines: Charming young lady, Miss Julia by name, Your friend, little Cally, your wishes proclaim; Read this, and you'll soon learn to know it, I'm not your papa the great lyric poet. In order to understand the local controversy which divided village sentiment concerning Fenimore Cooper, and gave rise to the long series of libel suits, it is necessary to consider certain influences of more remote origin. In 1826, when Cooper began his seven years' residence in Europe, before making his home in Cooperstown, he had become the most widely read of American authors. No other American writer, in fact, during the nineteenth century, enjoyed so wide a contemporary popularity. His works appeared simultaneously in America, England, and France. They were speedily translated into German and Italian, and in most instances soon found their way into the other cultivated tongues of Europe.[112] Cooper's friend Morse said that his novels were published, as soon as he produced them, in thirty-four different places in Europe, and that they had been seen by American travelers in the languages of Turkey and Persia, in Constantinople, in Egypt, at Jerusalem, at Ispahan. At a dinner given in New York in Cooper's honor, just before his departure for Europe, Chancellor Kent, who presided, voiced the general feeling by toasting him as the "genius which has rendered our native soil classic ground, and given to our early history the enchantment of fiction."