Cooper called the Mediterranean, its shores and countries, “a sort of a world apart, that is replete with charms which not only fascinate the beholder, but linger in the memories of the absent like visions of a glorious past.”  And so his cruise in 1830, in the Bella Genovese, entered into the pages of “Wing-and-Wing.”  The idea was to bring together sailors of all nations—­English, French, Italian, and Yankee—­on the Mediterranean and aboard a French water-craft of peculiar Italian rig—­the lateen sail.  These sails spread like the great white wings of birds, and the craft glides among the islands and hovers about every gulf and bay and rocky coast of that beautiful sea.  Under her dashing young French captain, Raoul Yvard, Le Fen Follet (Jack-o’-Lantern or fire-fly, as you will) glides like a water-sprite here, there, and everywhere, guided by Cooper’s sea phrases,—­for which he had an unfailing instinct,—­that meant something “even to the land-lubber who does not know the lingo.”  It is said many down-east fishermen never tire of Cooper, but despise many of his followers because of their misuse of sea terms.  But more of “Wing-and-Wing”:  there was lovely Ghita, so sweet and brave, and anxious for her daring young lover Raoul, and stricken by the tragedies that befell her in the wake of Lord Nelson’s fleet.  The brown mountains of Porta Farrajo, “a small, crowded town with little forts and a wall,” Cooper had seen.

[Illustration:  ISLAND OF ELBA.]

He had tested its best inn, The Four Nations, by a good dinner in its dining-room of seven mirrors and a broken tile floor, and had some talk with its host as to their late ruler,—­he said Napoleon came that evening, sent at once for Elba’s oldest flag, which was run up on the forts as a sign of independence.

[Illustration:  ELBA HOME OF NAPOLEON.]

Cooper saw Napoleon’s Elba home,—­“a low, small house and two wings, with ten windows in its ninety feet of front.”  He also saw the more comfortable one-story home of Napoleon’s mother.  Other isles and shores seen then—­during his cruise in the Bella Genovese—­found place in “Wing-and-Wing,” published in 1842.  The knowledge thus obtained of localities and the Italians led Cooper to say:  “Sooner or later Italy will, inevitably, become a single state; this is a result that I hold to be certain, though the means by which it is to be effected are still hidden.”

[Illustration:  THE BATTLE OF LAKE ERIE.]

[Illustration:  COOPER’S DIAGRAM OF THE BATTLE OF LAKE ERIE.]

During 1843 appeared in Graham’s Magazine Cooper’s “Life-Sketch of Perry,” “The Battle of Lake Erie,” and “The Autobiography of a Pocket-handkerchief,” or “Social Life in New York.”  This volume of Graham’s Magazine also included the life of “John Paul Jones,” wherein appeared Cooper’s masterful description of the celebrated battle of the Bon Homme Richard—­one of the most remarkable in the brief annals of that time of American naval warfare.