His common sense is another phase in the character of this great actor, who manifested so little for his own profit. He was the guardian of female morals against the perils of contemporary literature! "In my humble opinion," he says, "a licencer is as necessary for a circulating library, as for dramatic productions intended for representation; especially when it is considered how young people, particularly girls, often procure, and sometimes in a secret manner, books of so evil a tendency, that not only their time is most shamefully wasted, but their morals and manners tainted and warped for the remainder of their lives. I am firmly of opinion that many females owe the loss of reputation to the pernicious publications too often found in those dangerous seminaries." Cooke may be said to have been dying, from the day he landed in the, then, United States. His vigorous constitution only slowly gave way. It was difficult for him to destroy that; for in occasional rests he gave it, when he sat down to write on religion, philosophy, ideas for improving society, and diatribes against drinking, in his diary, his constitution recovered all its vigour, and started refreshed for a new struggle against drunkenness and death. The former, however, gave it a mortal fall, in July 1812, when Death grasped his victim, for ever. Cooke was taken ill, while playing Sir Giles Overreach, at Boston, on the 31st of the above month.[77] He went home, irrecoverably stricken, met his fate with decency, and calmly breathed his last in the following September, in full possession of his mental faculties to the supreme moment. He was buried in the "strangers' vault," of St. Paul's Church, New York, with much respectful ceremony, on the part of friends who admired his genius and mutilated his body, as I shall presently show. Meanwhile, let me record here, that Cooke was of the middle size, strongly and stoutly built, with a face capable of every expression, and an eye which was as grand an interpreter of the poets, as the tongue. He was free from gesticulation and all trickery, but he lacked the grace and refinement of less accomplished actors. In soliloquies, he recognised no audience; and his hearers seemed to detect his thoughts by some other process than listening to his words.