n hour to each; he smoked and doubted
eight hours, and he slept the remaining twelve of the four-and-twenty.
Such was the renowned Wouter Van Twiller,--a true philosopher, for his
mind was either elevated above, or tranquilly settled below, the cares
and perplexities of this world. He had lived in it for years, without
feeling the least curiosity to know whether the sun revolved round it,
or it round the sun; and he had watched, for at least half a century,
the smoke curling from his pipe to the ceiling, without once troubling
his head with any of those numerous theories by which a philosopher
would have perplexed his brain, in accounting for its rising above the
surrounding atmosphere.

In his council he presided with great state and solemnity. He sat in a
huge chair of solid oak, hewn in the celebrated forest of the Hague,
fabricated by an experienced timmerman of Amsterdam, and curiously
carved about the arms and feet into exact imitations of gigantic eagle's
claws. Instead of a scepter, he swayed a long Turkish pipe, wrought with
jasmin and amber, which had been presented to a stadtholder of Holland
at the conclusion of a treaty with one of the petty Barbary powers. In
this stately chair would he sit, and this magnificent pipe would he
smoke, shaking his right knee with a constant motion, and fixing his eye
for hours together upon a little print of Amsterdam, which hung in a
black frame against the opposite wall of the council-chamber. Nay, it
has even been said, that when any deliberation of extraordinary length
and intricacy was on the carpet, the renowned Wouter would shut his eyes
for full two hours at a time, that he might not be disturbed by external
objects; and at such times the internal commotion of his mind was
evinced by certain regular guttural sounds, which his admirers declared
were merely the noise of conflict, made by his contending doubts and
opinions.

It is with infinite difficulty I have been enabled to collect these
biographical anecdotes of the great man under consideration. The facts
respecting him were so scattered and vague, and divers of them so
questionable in point of authenticity, that I have had to give up the
search after many, and decline the admission of still more, which would
have tended to heighten the coloring of his portrait.

I have been the more anxious to delineate fully the person and habits of
Wouter Van Twiller, from the consideration that he was not only the
first, but