present as much of them every day as one man could get upon paper by sixteen hours' labor. He laughed at every thing and every body,—not excepting himself and his squint eye,—and though his jokes were not always good, they were generally good enough. People laughed, and were willing to expend a cent the next day to see what new folly the man would commit or relate. We all like to read about our own neighborhood; this paper gratified the propensity.
"The man, we repeat, had really a vein of poetry in him, and the first numbers of 'The Herald' show it. He had occasion one day to mention that Broadway was about to be paved with wooden blocks. This was not a very promising subject for a poetical comment, but he added: 'When this is done, every vehicle will have to wear sleigh-bells, as in sleighing times, and Broadway will be so quiet that you can pay a compliment to a lady, in passing, and she will hear you.' This was nothing in itself; but here was a man wrestling with fate in a cellar, who could turn you out two hundred such paragraphs a week, the year round. Men can growl in a cellar; this man could laugh, and keep laughing, and make the floating population of a city laugh with him. It must be owned, too, that he had a little real insight into the nature of things around him—a little Scotch sense, as well as an inexhaustible fund of French vivacity. Alluding, once, to the 'hard money' cry by which the lying politicians of the day carried elections, he exploded that nonsense in two lines: 'If a man gets the wearable or the eatable he wants, what cares he if he has gold or paper money?' He devoted two sentences to the Old School and New School Presbyterian controversy: 'Great trouble among the Presbyterians just now. The question is whether or not a man can do any thing toward saving his own soul.' He had also an article upon the Methodists, in which he said that the two religions nearest akin were the Methodist and the Roman Catholic. We should add to these trifling specimens the fact that he uniformly maintained, from 1835 to the crash of 1837, that the prosperity of the country was unreal, and would end in disaster."