Doctor Cooper Departs
 

DWIGHT C. MINER
 

[EPTEMBER 24, 1772, was a day of academic celebra-
. tion in King's CoUege, New York. The Reverend Myles
Cooper, M.A., D.C.L., LL.D., was to be welcomed back
to his presidential post after nearly a year's absence on official
business in England. At the appointed hour, some fifty students,
their professors, and various dignitaries of the community as¬
sembled in the College HaU for the carefully rehearsed cere¬
monies. The scene as the President entered the room must have
lingered in the memory of many of the spectators through the
troubled changes of later years. Still in his mid-thirties, resplendent
in the scarlet robes of an Oxford doctor of canon law, and fresh
from the councils of Fulham Palace and Whitehall, Cooper
seemed to personify that conception of a clearly ordered temporal
and spiritual society that prevailed in the England of the Georges
and found willing acceptance among certain influential groups on
this side of the Atlantic. A considerable number of those present,
it is true, entertained definite reservations on the subject of bish¬
ops, but Oxford and the monarchy were in high repute and
Cooper himself was well regarded as an administrator and a man
of cultivated taste. The welcome was more than a formality, and
the returned traveler was obviously among friends as he moved
across the HaU and settled his somewhat portly frame in the seat
of honor.

A modern observer would soon have wearied of the lengthy
exercises which followed. The President, too, was probably
bored, but practice had inured him to rituals of all sorts, including
the ordeal by youthful elocution. At appropriate points in the suc¬
cession of congratulatory addresses he managed what the New-
York Gazette termed "a polite and affectionate Answer," but