Again, in a Chronological Table, under the June date, he made the interesting announcement:

In response to this there came such a large gathering as would make it seem that all the townsmen had been baptized by one name.

It was by an odd slip that the only important book planned and partly written in these last years of the seventeenth century was not printed by Bradford. More than once had the Episcopal minister, the Rev. John Miller, talked with this first printer of his plan for a history of the colony which he was then writing. This would have been carried out, beyond all doubt, if the clergyman had not just then decided to go to England to settle some troublesome Church matters, taking his history with him. As ill-fortune would have it, the ship in which he sailed was captured by the French,—France then being at war with England,—and rather than have the slightest bit of information conveyed to the enemy through his means, the clergyman tossed the precious pages into the sea. In the course of time, released by the French, he reached England, and there rewrote the history from memory, and drew for it a quaint map of the town as he had known it. Having done so much he died, leaving his work to lie for more than a century and a quarter unpublished, until, in 1843, a London bookseller put it into print. The original, being sold again passed through several hands until it finally found a resting-place in the British Museum, where it is now preserved.

BROAD STREET, 1642.

The early days of the eighteenth century saw the fitting out of the first library to which the townsmen had general access—a library that in the next fifty years was to change from the private property of the Rev. John Sharpe into the Corporation Library, and later be chartered as the Society Library, under which title it was to live to grow richer and richer in literary treasures until it came to be called the oldest library in America in the days when the city had grown far beyond any bounds then thought of. In the first days of its existence, the library occupied tiny quarters, quite large enough for all the books it contained, in a room in the City Hall. This was not in the old Stadt Huys of the Dutch by the waterside, for that was gone now, but in a pretentious building facing the "broad street" that had been made by the filling up of the Heere Graft of old. Other buildings were set up at this same time. There was the new French Huguenot church which had been in Petticoat Lane and was now rebuilt in the newly laid-out street below the Maiden's Lane, called Pine Street from the pine-trees there. Then there was the church called Trinity. Though it, too, was a new church, the ground on which it stood had a history that harked back to the very earliest Dutch times. For it was upon the lower edge of the Annetje Jans Farm, the strip of land above the city to the west which had been given to the husband of Annetje Jans far back in the year 1635; that had been linked with another farm by Governor Lovelace to make the Duke's Farm; and had become the King's Farm when the duke after whom it was named became a king. And then, it having become the Queen's Farm (and Queen Anne graciously presenting it in the year 1703 to Trinity Church for all time), it took the last name that it was to have and became the Church Farm—a name that was to cling to it after every vestige of country green had disappeared from its surface, and when houses had been set upon it as thick as the stalks of grain that once ripened upon its rolling bosom.

'The Church called Trinity'

The library in the City Hall was yet quite a new thing, the church called Trinity had stood on the historic ground but a few years, the French church was barely completed, and the town was so sprightly and full of activity that 't is small wonder Madame Sarah Knight, coming at such a time, should find much to wonder at and to write about. Her coming marks another advance in literary New York, for Madame Knight was a bookish woman come from far-off Boston town, and was a teacher well versed in the "art of composition." She found all quite different as compared with her own Massachusetts, where her father had been sentenced to stand for two hours in the stocks, his conduct having been found "lewd and unseemly" when, on a Sabbath day, after an absence of three years, he had kissed his wife when she met him at his own door-step! No wonder Madame Knight thought New York society quite gay and reckless, for at this time Lord Cornbury governed, and he had an odd fancy for wearing women's clothing indoors for his own delectation and to the amusement of the citizens as he walked the walls of the fort. Though Madame Knight met many persons of quality and witnessed many interesting scenes, had her visit in the city been extended, say for half a dozen years, until the coming of Governor Robert Hunter, she would have met a man truly in full accord with her ideas and tastes.

Had Governor Hunter's hopes been fulfilled there might have been a far different writing of literary history. He came from England in the summer of 1710, from the midst of a busy and troublous life, seeing before him in imagination quiet and peaceful years with the wife he cherished, and a career which should be helped on by his correspondence with his English friends, Dean Swift, Richard Steele, Joseph Addison, and some others. It would be an ideal life; he had planned it well. But the repose he sought he scarce for an hour realized. Undreamed-of turmoil kept him in a whirl of unsettledness. And though the wife of his heart stood by his side, and he gained comfort from knowing that nothing could turn her away, differences with the Government at home, which refused to reimburse him for money spent; wrangling with the Assembly, which refused money for the conduct of affairs in the colony; the uprising of negro slaves; the turbulent actions of unfriendly Indians—these things and others left him never an hour for the work he had planned. It was a note of despair that he sounded when he wrote to Swift across the sea:

Still, for all this, he found time for some writing, especially for a play, the one called Androborus—The Man-eater,—in which he wrote in such a bantering, humorous, satirical manner of the colonial officers as to set the town going with laughter. From this on he got along better and the people came to appreciate their Governor. Gradually there centred about the house in the fort a "Court Circle," where the Lady Hunter shone brightly, not alone because she was the first lady of the province, nor because her husband was Governor and a writer, but because others came to know her as a loving, lovely, and lovable woman. But when it looked as though the Governor was to have at last the ease and rest and quiet he had hoped for from the beginning, Lady Hunter died! This was the worst that could happen to Robert Hunter. There was nothing more for him to live and struggle for, he said. He resigned his office and, before many years, his life.

At this time of the "Court Circle," a mild, quiet man, the son of a Presbyterian minister, came from Philadelphia to visit the Governor. And no one could foresee that this Cadwallader Colden would remain during the rest of his life and be, for almost half a century, the leader of literary New York.

Colden came to be a friend of William Bradford, as he had been of Hunter, and watched his work with deep interest. He often advised Bradford when that first printer of New York published the New York Gazette, in 1725, the first newspaper in the city, and upheld him a few years later when the second newspaper was issued by Bradford's old apprentice boy, Peter Zenger, who had become his rival.

In the first ten years that Colden lived in New York he wrote diligently, and published his History of the Five Nations, an exhaustive work telling of the powerful Indian tribes, of their forms of government, and their wars. This was one of the earliest books of importance, and he was planning a second part of this same history when, in the year 1732, Cosby came to be Governor. In after years Colden told how his studies and his writings were interrupted by the coming of the new and lively Governor.

The New-York Gazette

And now it seemed as though there were to be dissensions in the city. There was trouble with the Governor; trouble with Peter Zenger, who wished to print what the king's representatives did not want printed; trouble about who should be Chief Justice. But when these were straightened out there began a season of festivity, and during one entire winter there were entertainments at which the culture, the refinement, and the wit of the province gathered. These were days of splendor, when women wore gay brocades and arranged their hair in a variety of bewildering, towering, and fantastic shapes; when wide skirts were in the heyday of their fashion; when tight-lacing was in vogue; when men wore enormous wigs, and attired themselves in many colors, adorning themselves with buttons of silver—large, and decorated with the initials of the wearer.

In the height of this brilliant season there came from England, to visit the Governor's family, Lord Augustus Fitzroy, son of that Duke of Grafton who was Chamberlain to King George II. He was received with all the ceremony due to his rank. The Mayor, the Recorder, and some other city officials met, and presented to him the freedom of the city in a box of burnished gold. Soon Lord Augustus had made himself so vastly agreeable to one of the daughters of Governor Cosby that there was talk of a marriage. But everybody agreed that this could not be, for the match was beneath him, according to the ideas of English society. Still, the young man was determined, the young woman was inclined, and the Governor's wife was a strategist. So one mild summer's night the young nobleman, resplendent in gay clothes, with a couple of his friends, assisted Dominie Campbell over the fort wall, where they found the young woman waiting, and there in the silence and the darkness the marriage occurred. There was some stern talk of what ought to be done to Dominie Campbell, and wonderment as to what the Duke of Grafton would say, but nothing serious came of it, although the romantic wedding was the talk of the town for many a year.

Cadwallader Colden lived down by the waterside near the fort wall over which Dominie Campbell was dragged. And in his house there, when Cosby's rule quieted down, Colden got to his studies again. He lived until the days of the Revolution were at hand; lived to exercise the duties of Governor in a stormy period; lived to see the town rent by turmoil and political rancor; lived to be hated by many people for loyalty to a king they would no longer serve. Quite to the end of his life he remained a leader, and, dying, left writings on history, medicine, geology, botany, metaphysics, and other learned subjects.

KING'S COLLEGE, ABOUT 1773.

It was in this midway time between the days of Cosby and the period of the Revolution that William Smith lived and wrote. Not so marked a figure in literature as Colden, nor so profound a student; not one to leave so strong and lasting an imprint, but well to be remembered as a writer whose birthplace was New York. Born in the year after Colden published his History of the Five Nations, he attained a high place as a lawyer, giving his attention to the political and legal records. When still a young man he was one of those who spoke at the ceremony of the laying of the corner-stone of King's College—which was to be in existence a century and a half later as Columbia University. For many years he lived close by Colden and intercourse would have led to mutual good, but the two were not friendly after Smith wrote a history of the city and Colden criticised it.

Although William Smith was one of the earliest writers to own New York as his birthplace, he would not join in a revolt against the king whom he had served all his life. So he accepted the post of Chief Justice of Canada, leaving others to become the writers of the Revolution.

Chapter III
The Poet of the Revolution

IN the far down-town business section of New York, there is a street so short that you can walk its entire length in ten minutes or less time. It leads from the park where the City Hall is, straight to the river. Beginning at the tall buildings where the newspapers have their homes, it continues along between the warehouses of leather merchants and the solid stonework of the bridge that crosses from the Manhattan to the Brooklyn shore; leads to the open space at the top of Cherry Hill, then makes a steep descent as though about to plunge deep into the river. For much of its length it is a constant scene of noise and bustle and disorder—that is, in the daylight hours. At night, when it is silent and deserted, it suggests the time, far back in the year 1678, when it was a country lane some distance from the city, a by-path leading from the house of Jacob Leisler to the river. It was Frankfort Lane then, Leisler calling it so as a reminder of the German town of his birth. Now it has become Frankfort Street. Leisler's garden was close upon the spot where the street touches the parkside, and here Leisler was executed in 1691, a martyr to the cause of constitutional liberty.

The lane was beginning to assume the proportions of a street in the year 1752, when there lived in one of the dainty houses that fronted it the family of Pierre Freneau, the last of a long line of Huguenots. There were Freneaus who fought with the Huguenots at La Rochelle, and there were Freneaus still living in that ancient city when the revocation of the Edict of Nantes forced so many to strange lands. The Freneau family, refugees from their native land, prospered in America, and a son born in the Frankfort Street house in this year 1752 gave historic interest to the name. The boy was christened Philip, and came to be called the Poet of the Revolution.

Philip Freneau struggled through babyhood in Frankfort Street, and just as he was able to walk was whisked away to a farm in New Jersey, where his father had built a house, calling it Mount Pleasant after the old homestead in La Rochelle.

Quite within the throw of a stone of Frankfort Street, and in the very year of Philip Freneau's birth, was born Eliza Schuyler, who with the passing of years was to marry and bear the name of Eliza Bleecker and the title of the first poetess of New York.

The Collect

In her childhood, the future poetess had a favorite walk over the bit of rolling ground to the south of Frankfort Street, the spot called Golden Hill, which a few years later was to be trampled by many soldiers, where the tall grass was to be reddened by the blood of patriots—the first blood shed in the Revolution. She strolled hand in hand with her father over the green Common, which was to become the City Hall Park. Sometimes, in the mid-summer, she was taken on excursions to the shores of a pleasant lake, called the Collect, quite a journey from the city. It was there that John Fitch's boat sailed years before Fulton's successful boat was launched into the Hudson. When the city outgrew its early bounds, the lake was drained and solid ground made, and the Tombs Prison rose in gloomy majesty where the deep waters had been.

THE DEBTORS' PRISON.

Eliza Schuyler preserved a lively memory of playing about a little square frame building on the Common, and though she never spoke of it by name it was the first Poor House of the city. She wrote, too, of a certain day when she went to the Common with her father—he was an important man that day and served on a committee—to see laid the first stone of another building. It was only a Debtors' Prison, but it was looked upon as the most beautiful structure in the city for many a day. For it was in the main patterned after the temple of Diana of Ephesus. The townsmen of those early days admired the building, and would have grieved if they could have foreseen that the day would come when city officials would forget that the old prison had been copied from so perfect a model; would forget that it had been a military prison when the British held possession of the city; would forget that many a brave officer of the Continental Army and many a true patriot soldier had passed bitter days there, and dying had left memories of sentiment and poetry and historic interest hovering about the old place.

Still, though it could not be foretold, the day did come when it was no longer a prison but had become the Hall of Records, when it was called an ugly and unsightly structure which obstructed the view of newer and taller ones—buildings that Tammany architects considered the perfection of beauty perhaps on account of their costliness. So it must be torn down.

At the age between girlhood and womanhood, Eliza Schuyler left New York to live in the village of Tomhannock, and when news of her again reached her friends in the city she was the wife of John J. Bleecker. Only twice after that did she revisit the scenes of her early life, and it was not until her death that the writings of this first poetess of New York became well known and popular.

The short and peaceful life of Eliza Bleecker was nearing an end before—his college days being over—Philip Freneau again trod the streets of New York. Already his tireless pen was at work, the pen that was to aid the cause of the Revolution. But when it looked to him as though his country would not be able to throw off the kingly yoke, he decided on a journey. He passed two years in the West Indies writing of the Beauties of Santa Cruz and the House of Night. Then a longing for the home from which he received scant word came upon him. He started homeward, only to be lured from his course by the beauties of Bermuda, where he fell in love with the Governor's daughter, remembered in his verse as the "Fair Amanda." He was still writing, lolling his time away beneath tropical skies, when tardy news came that the colonies had declared themselves free. Swiftly he threw off the languor of repose, of love, of romance, and returned home. The charm of the sea life was on him then, so taking out letters of reprisal from the Continental Congress, Freneau the poet sailed over the sea, actively aiding his country's cause by capturing British merchantmen and sinking British ships for a year, until in 1780 he had a ship of his own built. But on her first voyage disaster befell her, and almost within sight of land the Aurora was captured. When Philip Freneau next saw New York it was as a prisoner on the hulk Scorpion, as she lay anchored alongside another notorious prison-ship, the Jersey, close by the Battery shore.

There never was such an energetic prisoner. Each moment was employed for his country, if not with his sword at least with his pen, which was quite as powerful a weapon.

The British Prison-Ship

In those days of wretched misery and suffering, within view of the city by day, in the noisome ship's hold by night, Freneau thought out his best-remembered poem, The British Prison-Ship and many another line which in the later days of the Revolution was to rouse American feeling; verse that was to be distributed to the American soldiers, to be read by them on the march and by the light of the camp-fires; lines that were to commemorate the victories and the heroism of the soldiers of the Revolution; lines ridiculing each separate act of the British.

New York, in this time that the poet Freneau lay a prisoner, was not as it had been in his college days. The battle of Long Island had been fought, and Washington and his army had been driven from New York. And on the night of the British entry a great fire had started in the lower part of the city, swept away the house where Bradford's press had been, leaped across Broadway and laid Trinity Church a mass of ruins scattered over the churchyard where Freneau's father lay buried.

The British soldiers were quartered in the public buildings; the British officers had taken possession of the houses deserted by wealthy patriots; the Middle Dutch Church, which had been the architectural pride of the city, had become a riding school for troopers.

The Middle Dutch Church

No one threw himself more heartily into these performances than Major John André, who was so soon to give up his life for his country. He even wrote some of the speeches used by the actors, and one of the poems he wrote for Rivington's Gazetteer was printed while he was away on his last mission, conferring with Benedict Arnold on the banks of the Hudson.

After the treason was discovered, Arnold sought a safe retreat within the British lines at New York, and lived for a time in a solid, picturesque little house by the Bowling Green. It stood on a grassy slope that stretched down to the water's edge a few boat lengths from where the Scorpion lay with the poet prisoner on board.

There was a picket fence, painted white, on one side of the green slope, and Sergeant John Champe once hid his men behind it to carry off Arnold when he should take his nightly walk by the waterside, an attempt that failed through Arnold's changing his quarters on the selfsame day.

When the Revolution was over, Freneau was again in New York, which slowly recovered from the ravages of war. Hanover Square was a favorite haunt of his. He has left the record that he loved to linger in that open space, where might be seen a mingling of business and home life. Freneau liked it, for there books were printed and sold, and, too, it was the "Newspaper Row" of the town. This open space had been at first Van Brugh Street, taking its name from Johannes Pietersen Van Brugh, a wealthy Hollander whose home faced the square for close upon half a century. It bore his name until in 1714, when with the accession of George I. of Hanover it took the name of Hanover Square.

In a house facing this square, Bradford printed the first newspaper, and though in Freneau's time it was still standing, a more stately building was to take its place and bear a tablet telling of the old one. It was here that the other early newspapers came into existence: Parker's Weekly Post-Boy, in 1742; Weyman's New York Gazette, in 1759; Holt's New York Journal, in 1766. It was here, too, that was prominently displayed the "Sign of the Bible and Crown," before the house of Hugh Gaine. Freneau had flayed this man in his verse many a time.

Gaine was an Irishman who published the New York Mercury, and changed his politics to whichever side was uppermost—Whig to-day, Tory to-morrow. He printed Freneau's satires against Great Britain as a Whig, and then as a Tory fell under the power of Freneau's pen, for Freneau hated inconstancy quite as much as he did Tory principles.

Then there was close at hand the home of Rivington's New York Gazetteer. This Rivington, failing as a bookseller in London, planted his sign in Hanover Square and proudly proclaimed himself as the only London bookseller in America. He established his Tory newspaper, the New York Gazetteer, and had it wrecked by patriots, who threw the furniture out into Hanover Square and moulded the type into bullets. It was he who printed the poems of André; who after the war gave up a Tory paper and was strong for the cause of the new nation and was in consequence denounced by Freneau.

Freneau smiled to see the signs of Gaine and Rivington changed to suit the views of the new republic and rivalling one another in their show of patriotism. Tempted into Gaine's bookstore by the display of volumes, he chanced upon a friend who called him by name. And old Hugh Gaine, turning slowly about at the sound of a name he knew so well, stared at the enemy he had never seen:

"Is your name Freneau?" he asked. And the poet answered:

"Yes, Philip Freneau."

For just a moment the bookseller hesitated, then said:

"I want to shake your hand; you have given me and my friend Rivington a lasting reputation."

It was in one of these very bookstores that Freneau met Lindley Murray in the year after the peace was declared. From their first meeting the two were friends. Murray had accumulated a fortune as a salt merchant on Long Island during the British occupation. Strong patriot as Freneau was, he was attracted to the son at first through the memory of the parent, for it was Lindley Murray's mother, living on Murray Hill, who had saved Putnam's troops from being trapped by the British. The friendship of Freneau and Lindley Murray might have ripened, but that in the year after their meeting Murray went to England, where he was to devote himself, for his own amusement, to horticulture, in a pretty little garden beside his home near York, and where he wrote his famous grammar for a young ladies' school.

writers

Fraunces' Tavern

In the years that followed the Revolution, Freneau spent much of his time in sea trips, but he was in the city again when George Washington took the oath of office as the first President of the United States at the Federal Hall in Wall Street; and was in the quaint St. Paul's Chapel, then quite a new structure, when Washington went there on the day of his inauguration. In the same year, Freneau lived for a time in Wall Street, close by the house where Alexander Hamilton lived, who in those days was a figure in literary New York by reason of his writing of the Federalist papers. That was thirteen years before Hamilton occupied his country house, "The Grange," far up the island, which was to be still standing a hundred years later, when the city had crept up to and beyond it, and left it where One Hundred and Forty-first Street crosses Convent Avenue. Close by, in narrow Nassau Street, when Freneau lived in Wall, was the home of a man who had been his classmate in college. This was Aaron Burr. He, too, in a few years, was to leave the humble house in Nassau Street, to live in the Richmond Hill house, where the British Commissary Mortier had lived, and from which Burr walked forth on an eventful morning in 1804 to fight a mortal combat with Hamilton on the Jersey shore.

Broad St. and Federal Hall

In 1791 Philip Freneau was in Philadelphia editing the National Gazette, the strongest political paper of his day, memorable for partisan abuse and for such bitter attacks on the administration that Washington alluded to its editor as "that rascal Freneau." The paper continued under Freneau until 1793, when he returned to New York for a time.

In those days of 1793 there were three or four detached houses in Cedar Street close by Nassau. In the one nearest the corner, on any day of the week a man, slender and tall, with eyes that were keen and gray, with dress always in perfect taste, with broad-brimmed hat and queue, could be seen. He came from this house and walked over to Broadway, and his neighbors watched regularly for his going and his coming. He was Noah Webster, editor of The Minerva, a paper at that time devoted to the support of President Washington's administration. His name was to become a household word, for his paper became the Commercial Advertiser (that lived and throve even in the twentieth century), and after he had left the city he wrote a world-famed dictionary.

Richmond Hill

The poetic muse hovered closest about Philip Freneau in the days of stirring scenes and momentous events. The Poet of the Revolution was less active when quieter days came. Still he continued to pass a life of restless energy, and lived far into another century and long after many another writer had arisen to eclipse him in the literary life of New York.

Chapter IV
In the Days of Thomas Paine

The city then lay between the park (a name that had just been bestowed upon the Common of old) and the Battery; with Broadway, the main thoroughfare of the town, sending out tendrils of narrow streets to tangle and turn about themselves in such persistent fashion that they were never to be straightened out. Quite abruptly, where the park began, Broadway dwindled from a street to a lane, but with a strong branch thoroughfare to the east which, with the advent of years, was to become Park Row. It was not a new thoroughfare by any means, since, as far back as the days of the Dutch Governors, it had been the one road that led up through the forested island.

There faced the road, and so quite of necessity faced the park as well, a square building, its front so taken up with windows and doors as to cause wonder that there should be any pretence whatsoever of a front wall. Not an attractive building, with these many windows always staring, like eyes, across the road into the park, but one to be remembered because, for one reason or another, it could well be called the literary centre of the town. Here it stood, the first Park Theatre, towering above its neighbors, glistening in its newness.

The Corner Stone of the Park Theatre

It was rare in the days when the Park Theatre was new, just as it is rare nowadays, for writers to be of a practical turn of mind. But in this little group, oddly enough, there was one man of business. He was the proprietor of the theatre, and although he wrote plays, and painted pictures, and wrote books, William Dunlap was a man of affairs. His home was around the corner in quiet Ann Street, which in another hundred years came to be a very noisy street indeed, crowded with venders of every sort of odds and ends that can be imagined. A block away, around another corner in Beekman Street, on the south side below Nassau, was Dunlap's home when he had given up the theatre, settled down to literature, and got to writing his important books, the American Theatre and the History, Rise, and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States. While he was yet managing the theatre, Dunlap's favorite strolling-place was up along the parkside, past the Brick Church, and so on a few steps across Nassau Street to where Spruce Street has its start. On any pleasant afternoon he could be found standing on that corner, for a time at least, before the door of Martling's Tavern, where the Tammany Society had its first home. Looking at that first Wigwam after this lapse of time, it seems picturesque enough, and it must in truth have been so, for the enemies of the Tammany Society were in the habit of referring to it as the "Pig-pen." A frame building, low, rough, and unpainted, with a bar-room at one end, a kitchen at the other, and between the two a "long room," some steps lower than the general floor,—that was Martling's.

THE FIRST TAMMANY WIGWAM

In the tap-room at Martling's, after an evening in which the untimely death of George Frederick Cooke had been discussed, Dunlap announced his intention of writing a life of his actor-friend, who then lay in a new-made grave in St. Paul's Churchyard. The book was written, and though few remember the volume now, it was widely read and served to keep alive the actor's memory. Since that time the grave has been cared for, and the marble tombstone, later erected by Edmund Kean, still stands amid the bushes close by the entrance door of the Chapel.

It was in the year 1810 that Cooke played at the Park Theatre, the first foreign "star" to come to the city and to attract the townspeople in such wise that they almost mobbed the playhouse in their efforts to see him. It was this same Cooke, who, hearing many speak of a young actor who had played there the year before, said, "I should have liked to have seen this Payne of yours." Cooke saw him the next year, and they appeared together in this same Park Theatre, Payne playing Edgar to Cooke's Lear.

The name of John Howard Payne did not then have the significance that it came to have later. For he was known only as a youth who had acted Norval in the tragedy of Douglas with such fiery earnestness as to be proclaimed the "Young American Roscius." Who could have foreseen that adventurous "boy actor" grown to manhood, and writing a song that was to live and be known the world over by reason of its appeal to all hearts?

In Pearl Street, scarce a foot of which is left untrod by the footsteps of the writers of the city, Payne was born. Around the modest house that bore the number 33, near to Whitehall Street, he first toddled with baby steps, and the nearby "broad" street, where the canal had been, was his first journey when he could walk. His parents moved to East Hampton, on Long Island, so early in his childhood, and so many of his childish days were passed in the fields there while his father taught school in the Clinton Academy, that East Hampton is often spoken of as the place of his birth. But for all that the "lowly thatched cottage" of his song was there, and for all that much of his later life was passed in foreign countries, Payne loved the city of his birth and took occasion many times to say so.

In London, when ill-luck bore hardest upon him, he wrote Clari, the Maid of Milan, and gave Home, Sweet Home to the heroine as her principal song. He received the honors of New York when he returned for a brief period, twenty-two years after his boyish triumph at the Park Theatre, and was so affectionately remembered that when, a decade later, he died in far-away Tunis, it was felt that he should not be left in a foreign land. But, although this sentiment was strong, it was not until 1883 that his body was brought to America. Then, for a day, the coffin lay in state in the City Hall, in the Governor's Room, close by a window from which a view could be had of where the old Park Theatre had stood, just across the stretch of green sward. And the people, in honor of the man whose one song had thrilled an entire world, filed past the sealed coffin by the thousands, and shed many a tear that day.

One of the tortuous streets springing from Broadway, starting close by Trinity Church, winding away to the east, and mingling with other streets until brought to an abrupt halt by the river, was called, and is still called, Pine Street. In the first days of the nineteenth century it bore no suggestion, save in name, of a forest that once stretched above the city. In those good old days when the Dutch held full sway, Cornelius van Tienhoven was the bookkeeper of the West India Company, and when he married the step-daughter of Jan Jansen Damen, the bride brought him as dower a slice of this forest. When, later, a clearing was cut through the wood it was called Tienhoven's Street. But such a name rang too strongly Dutch for those who served an English king, and when the English came they quickly called it King Street. And so it remained until after the Revolution, when, in remembrance of the Dutch forest, the name was changed to Pine Street.

Now, whether it was pure accident or whether he searched and found the prettiest street in all the town, it is nevertheless a fact that here Dr. Elihu Hubbard Smith had fixed his home, scarce more than a block from Trinity Church, and here he wrote much of his verse. Here, too, in his house, on many a Tuesday evening, met the Friendly Club, and at these meetings, following the custom of the club from the time that Washington lived in the city, each member in turn read a passage from some favorite author, thus giving impetus to the conversation. In Dr. Smith's parlor, joining in these discussions, sat William Dunlap, Charles Brockden Brown, James Kent, Joseph Dennie, and all the writers of the circle. It was Dr. Smith who wrote the prologue for the Park Theatre upon its opening, and not a member of the Friendly Club but attended the first performance.

MAP

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MAP OF STREETS IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK IN 1827.

It is small wonder that Charles Brockden Brown was the foremost member of the club. He had just claim. Thrusting aside criticism and advice, ignoring the fact that he was an invalid facing the hardship that must be overcome, he stood forth as the first writer in America to support himself by his pen alone. The Bar, even though there was ever so fair a prospect of his earning a living by it, could not attract him against his natural desire. The writings of this determined genius could not but be successful. Seeking no friends, but having many, preferring the single companionship of Dr. Smith, with whom he lived, Charles Brockden Brown wrote his novel, Wieland, and followed it in the next three years with Ormond, Edgar Huntley, Arthur Mervyn, Jane Talbot, and Clara Howard. Many a man of the pen, in admiration of the iron will of this first American novelist, finds a delight in thinking of him and in following his footsteps along Pine Street and the lower end of Broadway to the Battery.

The Post Office, William St.

In the days of bereavement following the death of Dr. Smith, the companion of Brown's solitude was Joseph Dennie. Often in the intervals of work they wandered through the quiet park, and many a time they knelt together in the Brick Church, a square beyond the Park Theatre, with the memory of their dead companion strong upon them. The shadow of their friend's death was still over them when they parted, and Joseph Dennie went to Philadelphia to start his magazine, The Portfolio, which was to cause the name of "The Lay Preacher" to ring through the land. He was in Philadelphia when Brown, in 1803, started The Literary Magazine and American Register. But the next year he was in New York again, occasionally joining in a literary partnership in which there was a third member now, for Brown had married the daughter of Dr. Linn, the Presbyterian minister. The years rolled on, and Brown sought to fight off death by terrific work. But death only clutched him the tighter. The strolls with Elizabeth, his gentle-hearted wife, grew shorter and shorter and less frequent, until they ceased altogether six years after his marriage, and another landmark in the literary history of the city had gone down.

There was one stately and studious member of the Friendly Club who, it is recorded, could seldom be persuaded to go to the Park Theatre except on the "great nights." James Kent, then a Professor of Law at Columbia College, when not at work (those were rare moments indeed), loved best to wander over the College grounds. These are now lost beyond all tracing in the overcrowding between the City Hall and Hudson River. Then it was a delightful country spot. When Professor Kent did not walk on the College grounds by the riverside, he strolled up Broadway past the hospital with his friend, Dr. David Hosack, and the two discussed at length the Elgin Botanical Garden that the physician had just laid out three miles above the city. It was this James Kent who came to be Chancellor of New York and whose memory lives in his Commentaries on American Law.

Beyond the city, separated from it in summer by a mile of marshy and untilled land, in winter by a dreary waste with a single road leading across a snow-bound way, lay the village of Greenwich. A dreamy little country place that had been an Indian village before the settling of New Amsterdam; with lines of peaked-roof houses on zig-zagged lanes, and now and again, in the midst of a farm-like garden, a rambling house of stone, with great square windows and gables enough for half a dozen houses. The village might have been thousands of miles away from New York for all the likeness it bore to it.

On a dusty and rarely travelled lane, that led from the village towards the city, lived a man who had won the hearts of Americans by writing Common Sense, but who lived to reap their hatred by writing The Age of Reason, a deistic argument against Christianity. In the quiet village his house was pointed out as the abode of a friendless man, and when they spoke of him the villagers whispered the dread name—Tom Paine.

There he lived with Madame Bonneville and her two sons, the only companions he cared to have near him save his own thoughts. In that picturesque spot he was fully content to pass his final days in solitude and marked contrast to a life of energy and excitement.

It is close upon a century since that time, and the pilgrim feet that seek to follow Paine through Greenwich Village must walk Bleecker Street (the dusty lane in much changed form), must pass Grove Street, and the fourth house from the corner, on the north side, walking towards the east, is Paine's. It was humble enough in the days when he lived there. It is far humbler now in contrast to the buildings that have grown up about it. A two-story frame house, the ground floor is made into a store, as though it made an effort to keep up with the business character of the street. Two brick structures rise above it on each side and seem to have forced the roof to a frightful angle, so different is it from its new neighbors. Once Joel Barlow went to see Paine there, and the two spent almost an entire day beside a front window, talking of many things. Paine recalled the troublous days of the French Revolution, when he had written his Age of Reason in the prison of the Luxembourg, and had given it to Barlow to find a publisher. The author of the Columbiad often spoke of the visit later.

The dusty road where the house stood, even though it was little travelled, came to be too noisy a place for Paine, for in his illness even the chance passer-by irritated him. So he moved away to a house in a nearby field, so far from the road that he found absolute quiet. In after days Grove Street swept this home away, and another building, numbered 59, is pointed out as the place where Paine died shortly after his removal.

The hatred of many people followed Thomas Paine even after death, and there could be no rest for an advocate of infidel opinions in a town where dwelt descendants of stern Huguenots. His body was taken to New Rochelle, and there, refused burial in hallowed ground, was finally laid to rest outside the town, in a corner of the farm given to him by the State in recognition of his services in the cause of the colonies against the mother country. Ten years later, William Cobbett, the English Radical, an ardent admirer of Paine, visited New Rochelle, and, seeing the neglected grave by the wayside, had the bones dug up one night and spirited away to England. In another twenty years the followers of Thomas Paine had grown in number, and the Paine Historical Society erected a monument over the empty grave by the roadside. But on this spot, where no rest had been permitted him in life or in death, it seems rather to mock than to bless his grave.

Chapter V
The City that Irving Knew

STRETCHING from Broadway towards the east, starting from the ivy-covered walls of the Chapel of St. Paul—here lay the scenes of Washington Irving's childhood. Golden Hill was the name given to this district, long before Irving was born; called so because of its golden appearance in the autumn days. It was a wondrously beautiful place, and set squarely upon the hill-top was an inn that, in the days of the Revolution, came to be a meeting-place for patriots. Even now, when the glories of Golden Hill seem quite forgotten, there are those who love to walk its crowded ways, and who firmly believe that it came by its name in prophecy of the golden flower of literature one day to be born close by it.

Golden Hill Inn

The lane that once had its course up the grain-covered hill is there yet; now, a crowded, dismal thoroughfare bearing the name of William Street. It is well to start with this old lane, partly because it is the oldest street in the Golden Hill district, and partly because the Golden Hill inn of old still stands upon it: a squatty building built of narrow bricks that were brought from Holland, with a tall chimney like none of its neighbors; a venerable house full of cracks and crevices, carved mantels, open fireplaces, wide doorways; made over to conform to modern business ideas, but not conforming to these very well; painted and patched up to look new, but looking quite its age to any one with half an eye for architecture.

Almost opposite this inn of Golden Hill, midway of the block between Fulton and John streets, there stood in the year 1783 a quaint little two-storied dwelling with high-backed roof. One morning the patrons of the inn had a bit to gossip about. It was a year for gossip anyway, for the War of the Revolution was near its close. The talk was of a child that had been born to the Irving family over the way, and who was to be called Washington in honor of the man so well named the "Father of his Country." Before another year the Irving family moved into a house next to the inn on the north and separated from it only by a garden. In this house Washington Irving spent his youth. Close by he was baptized, in the Chapel of St. George. The Chapel is gone now, but where Beekman Street crosses Cliff, on the front of a building appear in raised letters the words "St. George Building," that show the spot where it once stood.

Not far off is the place where the John Street Theatre was, where Irving went with his friend James K. Paulding, who was himself to make a name in the literature of the city. Irving's parents were not given to theatre-going, but Irving, when the family prayers had been said and he had been sent to bed, ofttimes crept out of the gable window, slid down the slanting roof, dropped to the ground, and stole away. He went, just as now following in his footsteps you can go, past the old inn, around the next corner where, on a house wall, is a tablet reciting the departed glories of Golden Hill, then on a few steps until you reach, close by Broadway, a dreary arcade. Walk through the arcade and you will find it heavy with the sounds of workmen and machines. The arcade was a covered way leading to the playhouse, and is all that remains of the theatre.

St. George's Chapel, Beekman St.

A score of steps from the school, at the northwest corner of Ann Street and William, Irving lived with his mother after his father's death. The house is no longer there, but there is one just like it five houses farther along William Street, that stood there in Irving's time.

In the Ann Street house, when he was a law clerk, he did his first writing, the sketches signed "Jonathan Oldstyle," and published in the Morning Chronicle, which was conducted by his brother Peter. From this house, while still a lad, he loved to wander down the streets that stretched over the eastern slope of Golden Hill, and spent hours on the piers watching the ships loading and unloading, dreaming of the foreign ports where they had touched, hoping that he might one day see the shores of those far-away lands. For even in his boyhood the longing for travel was strong upon him.

He was still a law clerk, and still living in this Ann Street house, when he sat in an upper room with his brother William and James K. Paulding, and they planned a magazine of their own. They went to see David Longworth, the printer, in his shop beside the Park Theatre,—"Dusky Davie" they called him, after a song that was popular at the time,—and after many conferences and much secret doing the three stripling writers started the sparkling Salmagundi on its way, with the avowed purpose "to instruct the young, reform the old, correct the town, and castigate the age." Paulding was the "Launcelot Langstaff" of the publication, and William Irving was "Pindar Cockloft" the poet.

To the west of Golden Hill, Cortlandt Street extends to the river. In a house on that street close by Broadway, the three writers of Salmagundi spent much time at the home of the Fairlie sisters. There lived Mary Fairlie, known to Salmagundi readers as "Sophia Sparkle," and who married Cooper the tragic actor.

In the Ann Street house most of the Knickerbocker History of New York was written. Washington Irving and his brother Peter were to write it as an extravagant burlesque on Dr. Samuel Mitchill's Picture of New York, then a very popular and learned work. But Peter Irving was forced to Europe by ill health in 1808, and Washington settled down to the history, changing its plan and scope. Ten minutes' walk to the north of where Irving lived in Ann Street is a little park—a green spot that has taken the place of the squalid Mulberry Bend slum. In Mulberry Street opposite the park was the location of the imaginary Independent Columbian Hotel where Dietrich Knickerbocker was supposed to have lived, and left his manuscript in payment of his board bill.

But by far the most important house connected with this part of Irving's life is gone now. This was in Broadway where Leonard Street now crosses. A square house of many rooms, indeed it was a mansion in the city of 1809. Here lived Josiah Ogden Hoffman, the protector of the youthful author, in whose office Irving came by his law training. In the Hoffman mansion, Irving courted Matilda Hoffman, the lawyer's fair daughter; here he saw her sicken and grow more feeble day by day; here she died, and so ended the romance of his life. He never mentioned her name in after days and could not bear to hear it spoken. But she lived in his memory, and he never married. In the depths of his seclusion, during the first months of his sorrow, he finished the History. But his heart was not in the laughter of the book, and he made joy for others out of his own sorrow.

Two years after this, Irving was living beside the Bowling Green, at 16 Broadway, with his friend, Henry Brevoort, at the house of Mrs. Ryckman. While here he edited the Analectic Magazine. From here he often strolled up Broadway as far as Cortlandt Street, to dine at the house of Jane Renwick, then passing her widowhood in the city. Her son became the Professor James Renwick of Columbia College. It was she of whom Burns sang as The Blue-Eyed Lassie.

Still another house knew the Irving of early days, the boarding-house of Mrs. Brandish, at Greenwich and Rector streets, where he went from Bowling Green. It was a pretty brick building on a quiet street then, but it is a gloomy-enough place to look upon now, darkened by the Elevated Railroad and overrun with hoards of noisy children and tenement dwellers; a strange spot to look for memories of the gentle-hearted Irving.

When Irving left New York in 1815, it was with no intention of remaining away any length of time. In England he wrote Rip Van Winkle, though he had never been in the Catskills, where the scene of his classic lay. In Paris he met John Howard Payne, and the two worked together, in the Rue Richelieu, adapting French plays to English representation—but this partnership came to little. He went to Spain and there, while writing the Life and Voyages of Columbus, he met a young man then fitting himself by travel to enter on the duties of Professor of Modern Languages in Bowdoin College. This was Henry W. Longfellow, unknown then as a poet. While in Spain, Irving occupied the Governor's quarters in the Alhambra, an otherwise deserted palace, abiding there in a kind of Oriental dream, and living over in imagination the Conquest of Granada. Back in London again as Secretary of the Legation to the Court of St. James, he arranged his material for the Voyages of the Companions of Columbus, and half a dozen other works. Then, after seventeen years of wandering, he returned to his native city.

Although he tells us that his heart throbbed at sight of New York, and that in all his travels he had seen no place that caused such a thrill of joy, it was no longer the city of his youth. He had left a town of one hundred thousand people and found a city of two hundred thousand. The companions of his youth had grown to be men, and many of them were renowned in literature and business life. He found streets grown long out of all remembrance, houses tall beyond all knowing, strangers who knew him simply as a name. He found many silent graves where he had left blooming youth. But for all this there were many ready and anxious to do him honor.

A few steps beyond Trinity Churchyard on Broadway is a narrow thoroughfare called Thames Street. It is easy to be found, and beside it is a tall building on which is a tablet relating how the Burns's Coffee-House once stood on the spot. This had been a mansion built by Étienne De Lancey, a Huguenot noble, and Thames Street was the carriage-way that led to the door. In this coffee-house the merchants of the city signed the Non-Importation Agreement in the days before the Revolution.

The City Hotel

When Irving returned to the city the coffee-house was gone, and on its site was the City Hotel, the main hostelry of the city. Here the chief citizens gathered and a banquet was held and all honor paid to the "illustrious guest, thrice welcome to his native city."

From the site of this old house, it is a pleasant walk down Broadway, past the Bowling Green to Bridge Street, where, at No. 3, Irving, after his return, went to live with his brother Ebenezer, who had been the Captain Greatheart of "Cockloft Hall." Here, in this home, Irving spent many happy days. It was called by him "the family hive," for it was always filled to overflowing with relatives.

writers

But one place above all others in New York is filled with the memory of Irving. This is a bit of ground on the east side of the city, a point of land stretching out into the river. Here of all places the spirit of Irving still lingers, for here of all places it is less changed in appearance since his feet trod the ground. In Irving's day it was a stretch of countryside with summer houses of the wealthy at long distances facing the river. Now, though the city has encompassed it, there is still left the one green spot by the riverside beyond Eighty-eighth Street. The East River Park they call it, and there are rough stone steps leading to the waterside, winding paths and overhanging trees—the trees that Irving stood beneath. And there, across the stretch of water, is Hell Gate, its tempestuous waters tamed by the hand of man, but nevertheless the same Hell Gate that Irving looked upon and that Irving wrote about. Part of this park were the grounds of John Jacob Astor, the friend of Irving. His house stood beyond the park, where Eighty-eighth Street now touches East End Avenue,—a square two-story frame dwelling of colonial type, painted white, with deep veranda, wide halls, and spacious rooms; set high upon a hill, backed by a forest of towering trees, and fronted by a vast lawn stretching by gentle slope to the cliff at the riverside. Here Irving was a guest, and wrote Astoria, telling of Astor's settlement on the Columbia River and of scenes beyond the Rockies; here he met Captain Bonneville and his friends, and the journals of the one and thrilling tales of the other gave material for the Adventures of Captain Bonneville.

The house of Astor is gone now, but within the limits of this park still stands the home of Gracie, the merchant, where Irving was a constant visitor, and where, in the rooms given over to stranger hands, still linger memories of Paulding and Halleck, Bancroft and Drake, and a host of others.

The House of Astor where Irving wrote "Astoria"

It was while working on Astoria that Irving began the building of Wolfert's Roost, the Van Tassel house of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, on that delightful spot on the Hudson which in the first days of Irving's residence there was called Dearman. In after time the name was changed to Irvington, in his honor, and Wolfert's Roost, in honor of the glorious country, became Sunnyside. It is Sunnyside to this day, altered by additions made in the intervening years, but still the house of Irving; and the ivy clinging to its walls has sprung from a root taken from the ruins of Scott's "fair Melrose" and planted where it now grows by the friendly hand of Jane Renwick.

Where Irving lived—17th St. and Irving Place

On the corner of Seventeenth Street and Irving Place (a thoroughfare to which his memory gave a name), late in life, Irving lived betimes. Here was once the home of John T. Irving, a nephew of the author. It is a sturdy house still, and looks as youthful as its neighbors that were built many a day after it. Then it stood quite alone in a stretch of country. From the windows of the large room on the ground floor, Irving could see the waters of the East River. In this room he wrote portions of Oliver Goldsmith, parts, too, of the Life of Mahomet, and arranged the notes of what was to be his last book—the Life of Washington.

But his real home was Sunnyside, and there, in the year 1859, when he was seventy-six years old, he died.