At this time, from December, 1840, to May, 1842, Mr. Mathews was engaged in the editorship of Arcturus, a Journal of Books and Opinion, a monthly magazine, of which three volumes appeared; and in which he wrote numerous papers, fanciful and critical, including the novel just mentioned.

In 1843 he published Poems on Man in the Republic, in which, with much vigor of thought, he passes in review the chief family, social, and political relations of the citizen. His Big Abel and the Little Manhattan, a "fantasy piece," is a picture of New York, sketched in a poetical spirit, with the contrast of the native original Indian element with the present developments of civilization; personated respectively by an Indian, and a representative of the first Dutch settlers.

In 1846 Mr. Murdoch brought upon the stage at Philadelphia Mr. Mathews's tragedy of Witchcraft, a story of the old Salem delusion, true to the weird and quaint influences of the time. The suspected mother in the piece, Ambla Bodish, is an original character well sustained. The play was successful on the stage. Mr. Murdoch also performed in it at Cincinnati, where it was received with enthusiasm. A second play, Jacob Leisler, founded on a passage of New York colonial history, was also first performed at Philadelphia in 1848, and subsequently with success in New York and elsewhere.

One of the difficulties Witchcraft had to contend with on the representation, was the age of the heroine. An actress could scarcely be found who would sacrifice the personal admiration of the hour to the interest of the powerful and truthful dramatic delineation in the mother, grey with sorrow and time. As a contemporary testimony to the merits of the play in poetic conception and character, we may quote the remarks by the late Margaret Fuller, published in her Papers on Literat ire and Art. "Witchcraft is a work of strong and majestic lineaments; a fine originality is shown in the conception, by which the love of a son for a mother is made a sufficient motiv (as the

Germans call the ruling impulse of a work) in the production of tragic interest; no less original is the attempt, and delightful the success, in making an aged woman a satisfactory heroine to the piece through the greatness of her soul, and the magnetic influence it exerts on all around her, till the ignorant and superstitious fancy that the sky darkens and the winds wait upon her as she walks on the lonely hill-side near her hut to commune with the Past, and seek instruction from Heaven. The working of her character on the other agents of the piece is depicted with force and nobleness. The deep love of her son for her, the little tender, simple ways in which he shows it, having preserved the purity and poetic spirit of childhood by never having been weaned from his first love, a mother's love, the anguish of his soul when he too becomes infected with distrust, and cannot discriminate the natural magnetism of a strong nature from the spells and lures of sorcery, the final triumph of his faith, all offered the highest scope to genius and the power of moral perception in the actor. There are highly poetic intimations of those lowering days with their veiled skies, brassy light, and sadly whispering winds, very common in Massachusetts, so ominous and brooding seen from any point, but from the idea of witchcraft invested with an awful significance. We do not know, however, that this could bring it beyond what it has appeared to our own sane mind, as if the air was thick with spirits, in an equivocal and surely sad condition, whether of purgatory or downfall; and the air was vocal with all manner of dark intimations. We are glad to see this mood of nature so fitly characterized. The sweetness and naivete with which the young girl is made to describe the effects of love upon her, as supposing them to proceed from a spell, are also original, and there is no other way in which this revelation could have been induced that would not have injured the beauty of the character and position. Her visionary sense of her lover, as an ideal figure, is of a high order of poetry, and these facts have very seldom been brought out from the cloisters of the mind into the light of open day."

Moneypenny, or the Heart of the World, a Romance of the Present Times, a novel of contrasted country and city life, was published in 1850, and in the same year Chanticleer, a Thanks giving Story of the Peabody Family, an idyllic tale of a purely American character. A Pen and Ink Panorama of New York City, is a little volume in which the author has gathered up his contributions to the journals of the day, a series of fanciful and picturesque sketches, chiefly illustrative of a favorite topic in his writings.

Besides these works, Mr. Mathews has been a constant writer in the journalism of the day, frequently in the Literary World of critical articles and sketches, and on social and other topics in the daily press of New York. He is also prominently identified with the discussion of the International Copyright Question, a subject which he has illustrated in his Address of the Copyright Club to the American People, and other writings, with ingenuity and felicity.

A characteristic of Mr. Mathews's writings is their originality. He has chosen new subjects,

THE JOURNALIST.

As shakes the canvass of a thousand ships,

Struck by a heavy land breeze, far at sea— Ruffle the thousand broad-sheets of the land, Filled with the people's breath of potency. A thousand images the hour will take,

From him who strikes, who rules, who speaks,
who sings;

Many within the hour their grave to make-
Many to live, far in the heart of things.

A dark-dyed spirit he who coins the time,
To virtue's wrong, in base disloyal lies-

Who makes the morning's breath, the evening's tide,

The utterer of his blighting forgeries. How beautiful who scatters, wide and free,

The gold-bright seeds of loved and loving truth! By whose perpetual hand, each day, suppliedLeaps to new life the empire's heart of youth. To know the instant and to speak it true,

Its passing lights of joy, its dark, sad cloud, To fix upon the unnumbered gazers' view,

Is to thy ready hand's broad strength allowed.
There is an in-wrought life in every hour,

Fit to be chronicled at large and told-
"Tis thine to pluck to light its secret power,
And on the air its many-colored heart unfold.
The angel that in sand-dropped minutes lives,

Demands a message cautious as the ages-
Who stuns, with dusk-red words of hate, his ear,
That mighty power to boundless wrath enrages.
Hell not the quiet of a Chosen Land,

Thou grimy man over thine engine bending;
The spirit pent that breathes the life into its limbs,
Docile for love is tyrannous in rending.
Obey, Rhinoceros! an infant's hand,

Leviathan! obey the fisher mild and young,
Vexed Ocean! smile, for on thy broad-beat sand
The little curlew pipes his shrilly song.

THE POOR MAN.

Free paths and open tracts about us lie,
'Gainst Fortune's spite, though deadliest to undo:
On him who droops beneath the saddest sky,
Hopes of a better time must flicker through.
No yoke that evil hours would on him lay,
Can bow to earth his unreturning look;
The ample fields through which he plods his way
Are but his better Fortune's open book.
Though the dark smithy's stains becloud his brow,
His limbs the dank and sallow dungeon claim;
The forge's light may take the halo's glow,
An angel knock the fetters from his frame.
In deepest needs he never should forget

The patient Triumph that beside him walks
Waiting the hour, to earnest labor set,

When, face to face, his merrier Fortune talks. Plant in thy breast a measureless content, Thou poor man, cramped with want or racked with pain,

Good Providence, on no harsh purpose bent,

Has brought thee there, to lead thee back again.

We think one of the rarest spectacles in the world must be (what is called) a Graham boarding-house at about the dinner-hour. Along a table, from which, perhaps, the too elegant and gorgeous luxury of a cloth is discarded, (for we have never enjoyed the felicity of an actual vision of this kind,) seated some thirty lean-visaged, cadaverous disciples, eyeing each other askance-their looks lit up with a certain cannibal spirit, which, if there were any chance of making a full meal off each other's bones, might perhaps break into dangerous practice. The gentlemen resemble busts cut in chalk or white flint; the lady-boarders (they will pardon the allusion) mummies preserved in saffron. At the left hand of each stands a small tankard or pint tumbler of cold water, or, perchance, a decoction of hot water with a little milk and sugar-“ a harmless and salutary beverage;"—at the right, a thin segment of bran-bread. Stretched on a plate in the centre lie, melancholy twins! a pair of starveling mackerel, flanked on either side by three or four straggling radishes, and kept in countenance by a sorry bunch of asparagus served up without sauce. The van of the table is led by a hollow dish with a dozen potatoes, rather corpses of potatoes, in a row, lying at the bottom.

66

At those tables look for no conversation, or for conversation of the driest and dullest sort. Small wit is begotten off spare viands. They, however, think otherwise. Vegetable food tends to preserve a delicacy of feeling, a liveliness of imagination, and acuteness of judgment seldom enjoyed by those who live principally on meat." Green peas, cabbage, and spinach are enrolled in a new catalogue. They are no longer culinary and botanical. They take rank above that. They are become metaphysical, and have a rare operation that way; they "tend to preserve a delicacy of feeling," &c. Cauliflower is a power of the mind; and asparagus, done tenderly, is nothing less than a mental faculty of the first order. "Buttered parsnips" are, no doubt, a great help in education; and a course of vegetables, we presume, is to be substituted at college in the place of the old routine of Greek and Latin classics. The student will be henceforth pushed forward through his academic studies by rapid stages of Lima beans, parsley, and tomato.

instantly. Or the body is treated somewhat as a small-spirited carter treats his horse; it must be kept on a handful of oats and made to do a full day's work. Famine has become custodian of the key which unlocks the gate of health to knowledge, to religious improvement and the millennium.

LITTLE TRAPPAN.

Tenderly let us deal with the memory of the dead-though they may have been the humblest of the living! Let us never forget that though they are parted from us, with a recollection of many frailties clinging about their mortal career, they have passed into a purer and a better light, where these very frailties may prove to have been virtues in disguise-a grotesque tongue to be translated into the clear speech of angels when our ears come to be purged of the jargon-sounds of worldly trade and selfish fashion. While we would not draw from household concealments into the glare of general notice any being whose life was strictly private, we. may, with unblamed pen, linger for a moment, in a hasty but not irrespective sketch, over the departure of one whose peculiarities-from the open station he held for many years-were so widely known, that no publicity can affront his memory. Thousands will be pleased sorrowfully to dwell with a quaint regret over his little traits and turns of character, set forth in their true light by one who wished him well while living, and who would entomb him gently now that he is gone.

Whoever has had occasion any time, for the last ten years, to consult a file of newspapers at the rooms of the New York Society Library, must remember a singular little figure which presented itself skipping about those precincts with a jerky and angular motion. He must recollect in the first halfminute after entering, when newly introduced, having been rapidly approached by a man of slender build, in a frock coat, low shoes, a large female head in a cameo in his bosom, an eye-glass dangling to and fro; and presently thrusting into his very face a wrinkled countenance, twitchy and peculiarly distorted, in (we think it was) the left eye. This was little Trappan himself, the superintendent of the rooms, and arch-custodian of the filed newspapers: who no doubt asked you sharply on your first appearance, rising on one leg, as he spoke :

"Well, sir, what do you want?"

This question was always put to a debutant with a sternness of demeanor and severity of tone, absolutely appalling. But wait a little, and you will see the really kind old gentleman softening down, and meek as a lamb, leading you about to crop of the sweetest bunches his garden of preserves could furnish. It was his way only: and, while surprised into admiration of his new suavity, you were lingering over an open paper which he had spread before you with alacrity, you were startled into fresh and greater wonder, at the uprising of a voice in a distant quarter, shouting, roaring almost in a furious key, and demanding with clamorous passion

"Why the devil gentlemen couldn't conduct themselves as gentlemen, and keep their legs off the tables!"

Looking hastily about, you discover the little old man, planted square in the middle of the floor, firing hot shot and rapid speech, in broadsides, upon a doubled-up man, half on a chair, and half on the reading-table-with a perfect chorus of eyes rolling about the room from the assembled readers, centring upon the little figure in its spasm. Silence again for three minutes, and all the gentlemen present are busy with the afternoon papers (just come in), when

suddenly a second crash is heard, and some des perate unknown mutilator of a file-from which an oblong, three inches by an inch and a half, is goneis held up to the scorn, contumely, and measureless detestation of the civilized world. The peal of thunder dies away, and with it the spare figure has disappeared at a side door, out of the Reading Room into the Library; but it is not more than a couple of minutes after, that the Reading Room tables are alive with placards, bulletins, and announcements in pen and ink, variously requiring, imploring, and warning frequenters of the room against touching said files with unholy hands. These are no sooner set and displayed, than the irrepressible Superintendent is bending over some confidential friend at one of the tables, and making him privately and fully acquainted with the unheard of outrages which require these violent demonstrations.

And yet a kind old man was he! We drop a tear much more promptly-from much nearer the heart -over his lonely grave, than upon the tomb of even men as great and distinguished as the City Aldermen, who once welcomed Father Mathew among us with such enthusiasm. Little Trappan had his ways, and they were not bad ways-take them altogether. He cherished his ambition as well as other men. It was an idea of his own-suggested. from no foreign source, prompted by the movement of no learned society-to make a full, comprehensive, and complete collection of all animated creatures of the bug kind taken within the walls and in the immediate purlieus of the building (for such he held the edifice of the New York Society to be par excellence). This led him into a somewhat more ac tive way of life than he had been used to, and involved him in climbings, reachings-forth of the arms, rapid scurries through apartments, in pursuit of flies, darning needles, bugs, and beetles, which, we sometimes thought, were exhausting too rapidly the scant vitality of the old file-keeper. He however achieved his object in one of the rarest museums of winged and footed creatures to be found anywhere. We believe he reckoned at the time of his demise, twenty-three of the beetle kind, fourteen bugs, and one mouse, in his depository. In one direction he was foiled. There was a great bug, of the roach species, often to be seen about the place-a hideously ill-favored and ill-mannered monster-which, with a preternatural activity, seemed to possess the library in every direction-sometimes on desk, sometimes on ladder, tumbling and rolling about the floor-and perpetually, with a sort of brutish instinct of spite, throwing himself in the old man's way, and continually thwarting his plans. And he was never, with all his activity and intensity of purpose, able to capture the great bug and stick a pin through him, as he desired. This, we think, wore upon the old man and finally shortened his days. It is not long since that the little superintendent yielded up the ghost. We hope some friend to his memory will succeed in mastering the bug, and in earrying out the (known) wishes of the deceased.

This curious and rare collection was, however, but a subordinate ambition of the late excellent superintendent. It was a desire of his-the burning and longing hope of his life-to found a library which should be in some measure worthy of the great city of New York. With this object in view, he made it a point to frequent all the great night auctions of Chatham street, the Bowery, and Park Row: and he scarcely ever returned of a night without bringing home some rare old volume or pamphlet not to be had elsewhere for love or money -which nobody had ever heard of before-and which never cost him more than twice its value.

He seemed to have acquired his peculiar taste in the selection and purchase of books from that learned and renowned body, the trustees of the Society Library, with which he had been so long associated. It has been supposed by some that he was prompted in his course by a spirit of rivalry with the parent institution. There is some plausibility in this conjecture, for at the time of his death he was pushing it hard-having accumulated in the course of ten years' diligent devotion of the odd sums he could spare from meat and drink and refreshment, no less than three hundred volumes, pamphlets, and odd numbers of old magazines. We suppose, that in acknowledgment of a generous emulation, it is the intention of the Trustees to place a tablet to his memory on the walls of the Parent Institution.

There is a single other circumstance connected with the career of the deceased superintendent scarcely worth mentioning. It is perhaps too absurd and frivolous to refer to at all: aid to save ourselves from being held in light esteem by every intelligent reader, and impelling him to laugh in our very face, we shall be obliged to disclose it tenderly, and under a generality.

A character so marked and peculiar as Little Trappan (Old Trap, as he was familiarly called) could have scarcely failed to attract more or less, the attention of the observers of human nature. They would have spied the richness of the land, and dwelt with lingering pleasantry on his little traits of character and disposition from day to day. And it would have so happened that among these he could not have escaped the regard of men who made it a business to study, and to describe human nature in its varieties. For instance, if Little Trappan had been, under like circumstances, a denizen of Paris, he might probably, long before this, have figured in the quaint notices of Jules Janin; Hans Christian Andersen would have taken him for a god-send in Stockholm: Thackeray must have developed him, we can readily suppose, with some little change in one of his brilliant sketches or stories.

Then what a time we should have had of it! Such merry enjoyment, such peals of honest laughter, over the eccentricities of little old Trap; such pilgrimages to the library to get a glimpse of him; such paintings by painters of his person; such sketches by sketchers; such a to-do all round the world! But it was his great and astounding misfortune to belong to this miserable, wo-begone, and fun-forsaken city of New York, and to have fallen, as we are told (though we know nothing about it), into the hands of nobody but a wretched American humorist, who, it is vaguely reported, has made him the hero of a book of some three hundred and fifty pages-as in a word-New York is New York --Little Trappan, Little Trappan-and the author a poor devil native scribbler-why, the less said about the matter the better! We trust, however, his friendly rivals, the trustees of the library, will be good enough to erect the tablet; if not, they will oblige us by passing a resolution on the subject.

GEORGE W PECK

WAS born in Rehoboth, Bristol county, Massachusetts, December 4, 1817. His ancestor, Joseph Peck, who came from Hingham in Norfolk, England, was one of the small company who settled the town in 1641.* The Plymouth court appointed him to "administer" marriage there in 1650. His descendants, for six generations, have lived at or near the spot where he built his cabin.

In the war of the Revolution three members of the family, uncles of our author, served in the continental army; one fell at Crown Point, another at Trenton, and the third became crippled fariner, and added to this the business of sawing and a pensioner. The father of Mr. Peck was a plank for ships. Until his death, in 1827, his son was bred to work upon the farm, with, however, good schooling at the district school and at home.

MW. Pack

After various pupilage and preparation for college under teachers of ability, and the interval of a year passed at Boston in the bookstore of the Massachusetts Sunday School Society, Mr. Peck entered Brown University in 1833. After receiving his degree in 1837 he went to Cincinnati and thence to Louisville. Opposite the latter city in Jeffersonville, Indiana, he taught school three months; and afterwards, on a plantation near Louisville. He then taught music at Madison, Indiana, and at Cincinnati. At the close of the year he started in the latter city a penny paper, The Daily Sun, which attained considerable pros perity. It was merged, the following year, in The Republican, Mr. Peck still continuing to take part in its editorship. After its early extinction he found employment for some months as clerk of a steamboat.

He left the West the next spring and returned to Bristol, Rhode Island, whither his mother had removed, and entered the office of Governor Bullock as a law student. The following year he continued his studies at Boston with Mr. R. H. Dana, Jr., until he was admitted to the bar in 1843. He continued in the office of Mr. Dana for about two years. During this time he delivered lectures on many occasions in the city and country towns. Finding himself ill adapted for the extemporaneous speaking of the bar he turned from the profesion to literature, and wrote several communications for the Boston Post, which were so well received that he was engaged as musical and dramatic critic for that paper in the winter of 1843-1, and continued to write for it for some time after. Among his novelties in prose and verse were a series of Sonnets of the Sidewalk.

In the spring of 1845, through the aid of the Hon. S. A. Eliot, and a few other known patrons of music, Mr. Peck started and conducted The Boston Musical Review, four numbers of which were published. In the winter of the same year he was engaged as a violin player in the orchestra of the Howard Athenæum, continuing to write and report for various journals. In June, 1846, he convoyed a party of Cornish miners to the copper region of Lake Superior.

In the fall of that year he went to New York, and through an acquaintance with Mr. H. J. Raymond, then associated in the conduct of the paper, was engaged as a night editor on the Courier and

Enquirer. He shortly after became a regular contributor to Mr. Colton's American Review, and was its associate editor from July, 1848, to January, 1849. He next published a species of apologue entitled Aurifodina; or, Adventures in the Gold Region. From that time he was variously employed as writer and correspondent of the reviews and newspapers, the American and Methodist Quarterly Reviews, the Literary World, Courier and Enquirer, the Art-Union Bulletin, &c., till February, 1853, when he sailed from Boston for Australia. After nine weeks at Melbourne, where he witnessed the first developments of the gold excitement, and wrote the first Fourth of July address ever spoken on that continent, he crossed the Pacific, visited Lima and the Chincha Islands, and returned to New York after a year's absence. As a result of this journey he published in New York, in 1854, a volume, Melbourne and the Chincha Islands; with Sketches of Lima, and. a Voyage Round the World, a book of noticeable original observation and reflection; in which the author brings a fine critical vein to the study of character under unusual aspects, and such as seldom engage the attention of a cultivated scholar.

Mr. Peck has, since the production of this book, resided at Cape Ann and Boston, writing a series of Summer Sketches, and other correspondence descriptive and critical, for the New York Courier and Enquirer. Mr. Peck is a well read literary critic of insight and acumen, and a writer of freshness and originality.

THE GOVERNOR OF THE CHINCHAS.

I did not go ashore till the next morning after my arrival, when whom I mentioned having met at Callao, took me with him to the Middle island. The landing is under the precipice, on a ledge that makes out in front of a great cave, extending quite through the point, over which, a hundred feet above, project shears for hoisting up water and provision. On the ledge, a staircase, or rather several staircases, go up in a zigzag to close by the foot of the shears; the lowest staircase, about twenty feet long, hangs from shears at the side of the ledge at right angles with the rest in front of the cave, and is rigged to be hoisted or lowered according to the tide, and to be drawn up every evening, or whenever the Governor of the Island chooses to enjoy his dignity alone.

A few rods from the edge of the cliff, directly over the cave, is the palace of the said governor, who styles himself in all his State papers,

"KOSSUTIL."

The palace is a large flat-roofed shanty, constructed of rough boards, and the canes and coarse rush matting which answers generally for the commonest sort of dwellings in Peru. It has, if I remember correctly, two apartments, with a sort of portico, two or three benches, a table, and grass hammock in front surrounded by a low paling, forming a little yard, where a big dog usually mounts guard. One of the apartments is probably the storeroom; there is a kitchen shanty adjoining the piazza on the side most exposed to the sun. The other is the bed-chamber and dining-room of Governor Kossuth and his aids. It contains three or four cot beds, an old table, and writing desk, and is decorated with a few newspapers, colored lithographs, and old German plans of the battles of Frederick the Great. Over Kossuth's couch are some cheap single barrel

pistols; the floor is guano. The situation overlooks nearly all the shipping between the Middle and North islands. Directly under it, but far beneath, the cavern from before which the stairs go up, runs through and opens into a narrow bight or cove, whose precipices reach up to within a few yards of the shanty. The noise of the surf comes up here is a softened monotone; below are a hundred tall vessels-the North island with its strange rocks and dark arches fringed with foam-in the distance, north and east, the hazy bay of Pisco lying in the sunshine, and if it be afternoon, the snowy Andes.

We found Kossuth at home. He is a Hurgarian, or at least looks like one, and has selected a Hunga rian name. He is a middle sized, half soldier-like, youngish individual, with quick gray eyes, and an overgrown red moustache. He wears his hair trimmed close at the back of his head, which goes up in a straight wall, broadening as it goes, and causing his ears to stand out almost at right argles From this peculiarity, as well as his general cast of countenance, he looks combative and hard. But his forehead, gathering down in a line with his nose, and his speech and actions show so much energy of character, that he does not look like a very bad fellow after all. He is full of life, and display, and shrewdness, and swearing, and broken English. I rather liked him.* His favorite exclamation is "Hellanfire!" and he loves to show his authority. He was polite enough to me, though the captains often complained of being annoyed by his caprices.

He invited me to conte ashore and see him, and offered to tell me "all the secrets of the island." He told me that he was one of the party of Hurgarians who came to New York on the representations of Ujhazy, who had obtained for them a grant of land. But he said, that land was of no use to them, they were soldiers-they could not work. Ujhazy, who had been a landowner at home, and not a military man, had made a blunder in obtaining landthey wanted employment in the army, or as engi neers and the like. That he, (Kossuth,) finding how matters stood, left New York for New Orleans, where he joined the Lopez expedition. From this he escaped, he did not tell me how, into Mexico. thence reached San Francisco, where he joined Flores, and so came to South America. Here, when that expedition failed, he took service in Peru, and finally had obtained the place he held on this island, where he said he meant to make money enough to buy land, and tell other people to work, but not to work himself. He pitied the poor Chinese slaves here, but what could he do? He could only make them work-and so on.

He talked and exclaimed "Hellanfire!" and gesticulated, altogether with so much rapidity that it was an effort to follow him; treated us to some of the wine of the country, (very much like the new wine of Sicily,) and other good things; cold ham, sardines, and preserved meats, which he says the captains present him with, more than he wants, and he never knows where they come from. According to him they all expect cargoes at once, and as he cannot accommodate them, they try to influence him by arguments and long talks and flattery, and in every sort of way, and he gets wearied to death in his efforts to please them-poor man! He told all this with a lamentable voice and face, and every now and then a roguish twinkle of the eye, that made it a great trial of the nerves to listen to him without laughing-knowing as I did the exact sum which

He appreciates Shakespeare. I gave the Spanish doctor an old copy, and Kossuth bought it of him. I told him it showed he must have some claim to his Lame.