Phillip Pendleton Cooke was born in Martinsburg, Berkeley county, Virginia, on the twenty-sixth of October, 1816. His father, Mr. John R. Cooke, was then and is now honorably distinguished at the bar, and his mother was of that family of Pendletons which has furnished so many eminent names to that part of the Union.

At fifteen he entered Princeton college, where he had a reputation for parts, though he did not distinguish himself, or take an honor, and could never tell how it happened that he obtained a degree, as he was not examined with his class. He liked fishing and hunting better than the books, and Chaucer and Spenser much more than the dull volumes in the "course of study." He had already made rhymes before he became a freshman, and the appearance of the early numbers of the Knickerbocker Magazine prompted him to new efforts in this way; he wrote for the Knickerbocker, in his seventeenth year, The Song of the Sioux Lover, and The Consumptive, and in a village paper, about the same time, humorous and sentimental verses.

"Nassau Hall, Princeton College."
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Benson J. Lossing, The Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1851)(The Princeton College image is not in the original International Magazine of Literature, Art, and Science article)

used with permission
of
Florida Center for Instructional Technology

When he left college his father was living at Winchester, and there he himself pursued the study of the law. He wrote pieces in verse and prose for the Virginian, and The Southern Literary Messenger (then just started), and projected novels and an extensive work in literary criticism. Before he was twenty-one he was married, admitted to the bar, and had a fair prospect of practice, in Frederick, Jefferson, and Berkeley counties. "I am blessed by my fireside," he wrote, "here on the banks of the Shenandoah in view and within a mile of the Blue Ridge; I go to county towns, at the sessions of the courts, and hunt, and fish, and make myself as happy with my companions as I can."

"So," he wrote to us in 1846, "have passed five, six, seven, eight years, and now I am striving, after long disease of my literary veins, to get the rubbish of idle habits away and work them again. My fruit-trees, rosebushes, poultry, guns, fishing-tackle, good, hard-riding friends, a long-necked bottle on my sideboard, an occasional client, &c., &c., &c., make it a little difficult to get from the real into the clouds again. It requires a resolute habit of self-concentration to enable a man to shut out these and all such real concerns, and give himself warmly to the nobler or more tender sort of writing—and I am slowly acquiring it."

The atmosphere in which he lived was not, it seems, altogether congenial—so far as literature was concerned—and he wrote:

"What do you think of a good friend of mine, a most valuable and worthy and hard-riding one, saying gravely to me a short time ago, 'I would'nt waste time on a damned thing like poetry; you might make yourself, with all your sense and judgment, a useful man in settling neighborhood disputes and difficulties.' You have as much chance with such people, as a dolphin would have if in one of his darts he pitched in amongst the machinery of a mill. "Philosophy would clip an angel's wings," Keats says, and pompous dullness would so the same. But these very persons I have been talking bout, are always read, when the world generally has awarded the honors of successful authorship to any of our mad tribe, to come in and confirm the award, and buy, if not read, the popular book. And so they are not wholly without their uses in this world. But woe to him who seeks to climb amongst them. An author must avoid them until he is already mounted on the platform, and can look down on them, and make them ashamed to show their fulness by keeping their hands in their breeches pockets, whilst the rest of the world are taking theirs out to give money or to applaud with. I am wasting my letter with these people, but for fear you may think I am chagrined or cut by what I abuse them for, I must say that they suit one half of my character, moods, and pursuits, in being good kindly men, rare table companions, many of them great in field sports, and most of them rather deficient in letters than mind; and that, in an everyday sense of the words, I love and am beloved by them"