, New York, and nineteen years later came to the city of New York
to fill a clerkship in a public office. His family was related to that
of Washington Irving by marriage; he was himself united to Irving by
literary sympathy and ambition, and the two young men now formed a
friendship which endured through life. They published the Salmagundi
papers together, and they always corresponded; but with Irving
literature became all in all, and with Paulding a favorite relaxation
from political life and a merely collateral pursuit. He wrote partisan
satires and philippics, waxing ever more bitter against the party to
which Irving belonged, and against England, where Irving was tasting the
sweets of appreciation and success. He came to be Navy Agent at New York
in 1823, and in 1838 President Van Buren made him his Secretary of the
Navy. Three years later he retired from public life, and spent his
remaining days in the tranquil and uneventful indulgence of his literary
tastes.

Dying in 1859, he had survived nearly all his readers, and the present
memoir was required to remind many, and to inform more, of the existence
of such works as "The Backwoodsman," a poem; the Salmagundi papers in a
second series; "Koningsmarke, the Long Finne, a story of the New World,"
in two volumes; "The Merry Tales of the Three Wise Men of Gotham,"
satirizing Owen's theories of society, law, and science; "The New Mirror
for Travellers, and Guide to the Springs," a satire of fashionable life
in the days before ladies with seventy-five trunks were born; "Tales of
the Good Woman," a collection of short stories; "A Life of Washington";
"American Comedies"; "The Old Continental," and "The Puritan and his
Daughter," historical novels; and innumerable political papers of a
serious or a satirical sort. As it has been the purpose of the author of
this memoir to let Paulding's life in great part develop itself from his
letters, so it has also been his plan to spare comment on his father's
literary labors, and to allow their character to be estimated by
extracts from his poems, romances, and satires. From these we gather the
idea of greater quantity than quality; of a poetical taste rather than
poetic faculty; of a whimsical rather than a humorous or witty man.
There is a very marked resemblance to Washington Irving's manner in the
prose, which is inevitably, of course, less polished than that of the
more purely literary man, and which is apt to be insipid and stra