Europe as Found

Cooper Writes Home

ANDREW B. MM:RS

IN midsunmicr of 1830 James Fenimore (hooper, ah'cady
famous as the American author of three of the "Leather-
stocking Tales," put pen to paper as a veteran resident in
Europe to write home about life overseas. The place Dresden,
the peacefid capital on the Elbe of the small kingdom of Saxony,
a provincial city but one Ions; renowned for its hcritasje of the fine
arts. Fellow Knickerbocker man of letters and seasoned traxeler
\A ashington Irving had in 1822 in a family letter written accu¬
rately of it as "a place of taste, intellect, and literary feeling."
Dresden had often been called the Florence of Germany.

Cooper's lines, in a long private letter, were addressed to a good
friend in his natix'e New York, a member of the distinguished Jay
family long intimate with the novelist's own. The Solton and Julia
Engel Collection recently acquired this four page letter sent to
Mary Rutherford Clarkson Jay (Mrs. Peter Augustus), thus at
one and the same time adding to the Libraries' extensive Jay ma¬
terial and its more modest Cooperiana.

The novelist's extensive correspondence has, as part of a resur¬
gence of serious interest in both the man and the artist, been col¬
lected in scholarly fashion into six volumes of Letters and Journals
(1960-1968), edited impeccably by James Franklin Beard. This
Cooper-Jay letter, known to him only in a transcription carefully
done some years ago when the manuscript was in other hands was
included in Volume I. Even though the letter has been published,
it is still a coup to acquire the original, especially since substantial
Cooper letters, ones combining characteristic incisive comment

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