of the idea that one man is as good as another; these and scores of
similar utterances arrest constantly the reader's attention. But they do
not jar upon his feelings as in many other of his writings. They are
essentially different in tone. There runs through this series a vein of
ill-natured amiability or amiable ill-nature--it is hard to say which
phrase is more appropriate--which gives to the whole what
horticulturists call a delicate sub-acid flavor. The roar of contempt
found in previous writings subsided in these into a sort of prolonged
but subdued growl. But it is a case in which the reader feels that it is
eminently proper that the writer should growl. It is the old man of
sixty-five telling the tale of his early years. His preferences for the
past do not irritate us, they entertain us. It is right that the world
about him should seem meaner and more commonplace than it did in the
fever-fit of youth and love, when it was joy merely to live. The work,
moreover, has another characteristic that gives it a whimsical
attractiveness. It is a tale of the good old times when New York had
still some New York feeling left; when her old historic names still
carried weight and found universal respect, and her old families still
ruled society with a despotic sway; and especially before the whole
state had been overrun by the lank, angular, loose-jointed, slouching,
shrewd, money-worshiping sons of the Puritans, whose restless activity
had triumphed over the slow and steady respectability of the original
settlers. The scene of this story, so far as it is laid on land, is
mainly in the river counties; but in spite of that fact it is difficult
not to think that some recollections of the writer's own youth (p. 251)
were not mingled in certain portions of it. Especially is it a hard task
not to fancy that in the heroine, Lucy Harding, he was drawing, in some
slight particulars at least, the picture of his own wife, and telling
the story of his early love.

The delineation of the New York life of the past which he had in some
measure accomplished in these volumes, he now continued more fully in
certain works which took up successive periods in the history of the
state. The idea of writing them was suggested by events that were taking
place at the time. The troubles which arose in certain counties of New
York after the death, in 1839, of Stephen Van Rensselaer, the patroon,
were now culminating in a series of acts of violence a