JULIAN HAWTHORNE. HAWTHORNE, JULIAN, an American novelist, the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne; born in Boston, June 22, 1846. After four years in Harvard University he entered the Scientific School of Harvard in 1867, and the next year went to Dresden to continue the study of civil engineering. On his return to America in 1870 he joined the staff of hydrographic engineers in the New York Dock Department. About this time he contributed several short stories to the maga zines. His first novel, "Bressant," appeared in 1873, and was followed by "Idolatry" (1874). His next publication was a collection entitled "Saxon Studies" (1875), contributed first to the "Contemporary Review." "Garth," begun in 1875 in "Harper's Magazine," was published in book form in 1877. At this time Mr. Hawthorne was living in England. To this time belong "Archibald Malmaison," "Prince Saroni's Wife," "Mrs. Gainsborough's Diamonds," and numerous short tales. "Sebastian Strome " was published in 1880, "Fortune's Fool" and "Dust," between 1880 and 1883. In 1882 the author returned to America. Since that time he has written "Beatrice Randolph," "Noble Blood," "Love or a Name," "Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife" (1883), "Confessions and Criticisms," "John Parmelee's Curse" (1886), "A Tragic Mystery" and "The Great Bank Robbery" (1887), the last two founded on facts furnished by a New York detective. In 1888 Mr. Hawthorne published "The Professor's Sister;" in 1893, "Six Cent Sam's ;" and in December, 1895, was awarded the New York "Herald " prize of $10,000 for his novel "A Fool of Nature." In 1889 he visited Europe with a delegation of fifty workingmen to examine the condition of European industries. For several years subsequent he resided in Jamaica. In 1896-97 he visited India to examine the famine districts for the "Cosmopolitan," and in 1898 went to Cuba as a war correspondent. JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. MORE than a century ago, in the town of Burlington, New Jersey, was born a man destined to become one of the best known figures of his time. He was as devout an American as ever lived, for he could arraign the shortcomings of his countrymen as stanchly as he could defend and glorify their ideals. He entered fearlessly and passionately into the life around him, seeing intensely, yet sometimes blind; feeling ardently, yet not always aright; acting with might and conviction, yet not seldom amiss. He loved and revered good, scorned and hated evil, and with the strength and straightforwardness of a bull championed the one and gored the other. He worshipped justice, but lacked judgment; his brain, stubborn and logical, was incongruously mated with a deep and tender heart. A brave and burly backwoods gentleman was he, with a smattering of the humanities from Yale, and a dogged precision of principle and conduct from six years in the navy. He had the iron memory proper to a vigorous organization and a serious observant mind; he was tirelessly industrious - in nine-and-twenty years he published thirty-two novels, many of them of prodigious length, besides producing much matter never brought to light. His birth fell at a noble period of our history, and his surroundings fostered true and generous manhood. Doubtless many of his contemporaries were as true men as he: but to Cooper in addition was Vouchsafed the gift of genius; and that magic quality dominated and transfigured his else rugged and intractable nature, and made his name known and loved over all the earth. No author has been more widely read than he; no American author has won even a tithe of his honorable popularity. Though Jersey may claim his birthplace, Cooper's childhood from his second to his fourteenth year was passed on the then frontiers of civilization, at Cooperstown on the Susquehanna. There in the primeval forest, hard by the broad Lake Otsego and the wide-flowing river, the old Judge built his house and laid out his town. Trees, mountains, wild animals, and wild men nursed the child, and implanted in him seeds of poetry and wrought into the sturdy fibres of his mind golden threads of creative imagination. Then round about the hearth at night, men of pith and character told tales of the Revolution, of battle, adventure, and endurance, which the child, hearing, fed upon with his soul, and grew strong in patriotism and independence. Nobility was innate in him; he conceived lofty and sweet ideals of human nature and conduct, and was never false to them thereafter. The ideal Man the ideal Woman - he believed in them to the end. And more than twice or thrice in his fictions we find personages like Harvey Birch, Leatherstocking, Long Tom Coffin, the jailer's daughter in "The Bravo," and Mabel Dunham and Dew-of-June in "The Pathfinder," which give adequate embodiment to his exalted conception of the possibilities of his fellow creatures. For though portrayal of character in the ultra-refined modern sense of the term was impossible to Cooper, yet he perceived and could impressively present certain broad qualities of human nature, and combine them in consistent and memorable figures. Criticism may smile now and then, and psychology arch her eyebrows, but the figures live, and bid fair to be lusty long after present fashions have been forgotten. But of the making of books, Cooper, during the first three decades of his life, had no thought at all. He looked forward to a career of action; and after Yale College had given him a glimpse of the range of knowledge, he joined a vessel as midshipman, with the prospect of an admiral's cocked hat and glory in the distance. The glory, however, with which the ocean was to crown him, was destined to be gained through the pen and not the sword, when at the age of five-and-thirty he should have published "The Pilot." As a naval officer he might have helped to whip the English in the War of 1812; but as author of the best sea story in the language he conquered all the world of readers unaided. Meanwhile, when he was twenty-one years old he married a Miss Delancey, whose goodness (according to one of his biographers) was no less eminent than his genius, and who died but a short time before him. The joys of wedded life in a home of his own outweighed with him the chances of warlike distinction, and he resigned his commission and took command of a farm in Westchester County; and a gentleman farmer, either there or at his boyhood's home in Cooperstown, he remained till the end, with the exception of his seven-years' sojourn in Europe. His was a bodily frame built to endure a hundred years, and the robustness of his intelligence and the vivacity of his feelings would have kept him young throughout; yet he died of a dropsy, at the prime of his powers, in 1851, heartily mourned by innumerable friends, and having already outlived all his enmities. He died, too, the unquestioned chief of American novelists; and however superior to his may have been the genius of his contemporary, Walter Scott, the latter can hardly be said to have rivalled him in breadth of dominion over readers of all nationalities. Cooper was a household name from New York to Ispahan, from St. Petersburg to Rio Janeiro; and the |