COOPER, Myles, English loyalist : b. Eng land 1735; d. Edinburgh, Scotland, 1 May 1785. He was the second president of King's College, now Columbia Vniversity, New York. He studied at Oxford, became fellow of Queen's College in 1760, and in 1761 published a volume of miscellaneous verse of correct style, but full of artificiality and classical imitations. In 1762 he became assistant to Dr. Johnson, president of King's College, and after a year as professor of moral philosophy, Cooper, then 28, was elected president in May 1763, upon the resigna tion of Johnson. Upon his accession the college had a faculty of four members. Both discipline and members rose during his administration, and a medical school was added. From 1767 to 1771 Cooper was in England, and after his return to America showed himself not only a typical high-churchman and Tory, but the mas ter of a trenchant and sarcastic pen. He pub lished 'The American Querist' in 1774 and in the same year wrote
Ye of Congress Now?) (1775) urged that Americans were not bound by the decrees of Congress, as that body had transcended the powers granted to it. In the same year he was forced to leave New York, narrowly escaping ill-treatment at the hands of a mob. His de parture from America he described in a poem in the Gentleman's Magazine for July 1776. In England he received a parish in Berkshire after a short residence at Oxford, where he preached in 1776 a sermon entitled (National Humiliation and Repentance Recommended, and the Causes of the Present Rebellion in America Assigned,' a violent attack on the English Whigs. During the last years of his life he was senior minister of the first Episcopal chapel in Edinburgh. John Trumbull, in (McFingal,) speaks of ((punster Cooper's reverend head,)) and he seems to have been a wit of rather free and convivial habits. Among the men who were educated under him were Gouverneur Morris, Robert Livingston, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. He was the prominent classical scholar of 18th century America.