in 1657 was back again in Stockholm, where he died in the early part of 1660. The date of his birth is not known, but he is believed to have been born in London.
For full information regarding his career, and for various documents bearing his signature, see The History of Portrait Miniatures, by G. C. Williamson, chap. vi. page 78, and an article in the Nineteenth Century for October 1905. (G. C. W.)
COOPER, SIR ASTLEY PASTON (1768–1841), English surgeon, was born at the village of Brooke in Norfolk on the 23rd of August 1768. His father, Dr Samuel Cooper, was a clergyman of
the Church of England; his mother was the author of several
novels. At the age of sixteen he was sent to London and placed
under Henry Cline (1750–1827), surgeon to St Thomas’s hospital. From the first he devoted himself to the study of anatomy, and
had the privilege of attending the lectures of John Hunter. In
1789 he was appointed demonstrator of anatomy at St Thomas’s
hospital, where in 1791 he became joint lecturer with Cline in
anatomy and surgery, and in 1800 he was appointed surgeon to
Guy’s hospital, on the death of his uncle, William Cooper. In
1802 he received the Copley medal for two papers read before the
Royal Society of London on the destruction of the membrana
tympani; and in 1805 he was elected a fellow of that society.
In the same year he took an active part in the formation of the
Medico-Chirurgical Society, and published in the first volume of
its Transactions an account of an attempt to tie the common
carotid artery for aneurism. In 1804 he brought out the first,
and in 1807 the second, part of his great work on hernia, which
added so largely to his reputation that in 1813 his annual professional
income rose to £21,000 sterling. In the same year he
was appointed professor of comparative anatomy to the Royal
College of Surgeons and was very popular as a lecturer. In 1817
he performed his famous operation of tying the abdominal aorta
for aneurism; and in 1820 he removed a wen from the head of
George IV., and about six months afterwards received a
baronetcy, which, as he had no son, was to descend to his
nephew and adopted son, Astley Cooper. He served as president
of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1827 and again in 1836, and
he was elected a vice-president of the Royal Society in 1830. He
died on the 12th of February 1841 in London, and was interred,
by his own desire, beneath the chapel of Guy’s hospital. A statue by E. H. Baily was erected in St Paul’s.
His chief works are Anatomy and Surgical Treatment of Hernia (1804–1807); Dislocations and Fractures (1822); Lectures on Surgery (1824–1827); Illustrations of Diseases of the Breast (1829); Anatomy of the Thymus Gland (1832); Anatomy of the Breast (1840). See Life of Sir A. Cooper, by B. B. Cooper (1843).
COOPER, CHARLES HENRY (1808–1866), English antiquary, was born at Great Marlow, on the 20th of March 1808, being descended from a family formerly settled at Bray, Berkshire.
He received his education at a private school in Reading. In
1826 he fixed his residence at Cambridge, and in 1836 was elected
coroner of the borough. Four years later he was admitted a
solicitor, and in course of time he acquired an extensive practice,
but his taste and inclination ultimately led him to devote almost
the whole of his time to literary research, and especially the
elucidation of the history of the university of Cambridge. In
1849 he resigned the office of borough coroner on being elected
to the town-clerkship, which he retained till his death on the
21st of March 1866. His earliest production, A New Guide to
the University and Town of Cambridge, was published anonymously
in 1831. The Annals of Cambridge followed (1842–1853) containing
a chronological history of the university and town from
the earliest period to 1853. His most important work, the
Athenae Cantabrigienses (1858, 1861), a companion work to the
famous Athenae Oxonienses of Anthony à Wood, contains
biographical memoirs of the authors and other men of eminence
who were educated at the university of Cambridge from 1500
to 1609. Cooper’s other works are The Memorials of Cambridge,
(1858–1866) and a Memoir of Margaret, Countess of Richmond
and Derby (1874). He was a constant contributor to Notes and
Queries, the Gentleman’s Magazine and other antiquarian publications,
and left an immense collection of MS. materials for a
biographical history of Great Britain and Ireland.
COOPER, JAMES FENIMORE (1789–1851), American novelist,
was born at Burlington, New Jersey, on the 15th of September
1789. Reared in the wild country round Otsego Lake, N.Y., on
the yet unsettled estates of his father, a judge and member of
Congress, he was sent to school at Albany and at New Haven,
and entered Yale College in his fourteenth year, remaining for
some time the youngest student on the rolls. Three years afterwards
he joined the United States navy; but after making a
voyage or two in a merchant vessel, to perfect himself in seamanship,
and obtaining his lieutenancy, he married and resigned
his commission (1811). He settled in Westchester county, N.Y.,
the “Neutral Ground” of his earliest American romance, and
produced anonymously (1820) his first book, Precaution, a novel
of the fashionable school. This was followed (1821) by The Spy,
which was very successful at the date of issue; The Pioneers
(1823), the first of the “Leatherstocking” series; and The
Pilot (1824), a bold and dashing sea-story. The next was Lionel
Lincoln (1825), a feeble and unattractive work; and this was
succeeded in 1826 by the famous Last of the Mohicans, a book
that is often quoted as its author’s masterpiece. Quitting
America for Europe he published at Paris The Prairie (1826),
the best of his books in nearly all respects, and The Red Rover,
(1828), by no means his worst.
At this period the unequal and uncertain talent of Cooper would seem to have been at its best. These excellent novels were, however, succeeded by one very inferior, The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829); by The Notions of a Travelling Bachelor (1828), an uninteresting book; and by The Waterwitch (1830), one of the poorest of his many sea-stories. In 1830 he entered the lists as a party writer, defending in a series of letters to the National, a Parisian journal, the United States against a string of charges brought against them by the Revue Britannique; and for the rest of his life he continued skirmishing in print, sometimes for the national interest, sometimes for that of the individual, and not infrequently for both at once. This opportunity of making a political confession of faith appears not only to have fortified him in his own convictions, but to have inspired him with the idea of imposing them on the public through the medium of his art. His next three novels, The Bravo (1831), The Heidenmauer (1832) and The Headsman: or the Abbaye of Vigneron (1833), were designed to exalt the people at the expense of the aristocracy. Of these the first is by no means a bad story, but the others are among the dullest ever written; all were widely read on both sides of the Atlantic.
In 1833 Cooper returned to America, and immediately published A Letter to my Countrymen, in which he gave his own version of the controversy he had been engaged in, and passed some sharp censure on his compatriots for their share in it. This attack he followed up with The Monikins (1835) and The American Democrat (1835); with several sets of notes on his travels and experiences in Europe, among which may be remarked his England (1837), in three volumes, a burst of vanity and ill-temper; and with Homeward Bound, and Home as Found (1838), noticeable as containing a highly idealized portrait of himself. All these books tended to increase the ill-feeling between author and public; the Whig press was virulent and scandalous in its comments, and Cooper plunged into a series of actions for libel. Victorious in all of them, he returned to his old occupation with something of his old vigour and success. A History of the Navy of the United States (1839), supplemented (1846) by a set of Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers, was succeeded by The Pathfinder (1840), a good “Leatherstocking” novel; by Mercedes of Castile (1840); The Deerslayer (1841); by The Two Admirals and by Wing and Wing (1842); by Wyandotte, The History of a Pocket Handkerchief, and Ned Myers (1843); and by Afloat and Ashore, or the Adventures of Miles Wallingford (1844). From pure fiction, however, he turned again to the combination of art and controversy in which he had achieved distinction, and in the two Littlepage Manuscripts (1845–1846) he fought with a great deal of vigour. His next novel was The Crater, or Vulcan’s Peak (1847), in which he attempted to introduce supernatural machinery with indifferent success; and this
