dfather, William Samuel Johnson, of Stratford, in
Connecticut, was one of the revolutionary fathers. Before the revolution,
he was the agent of Connecticut in England; when it broke out he took a
zealous part in the cause of the revolted colonies; he was a delegate to
Congress from his State when Congress sat in New York, and he aided in
framing the Constitution of the United States. Afterwards, he was
President of Columbia College from the year 1787 to the year 1800, when,
resigning the post, he returned to Stratford, where he died in 1819, at
the age of ninety-two. His father, the great-grandfather of the subject of
this memoir, was Dr. Samuel Johnson, of Stratford, one of the finest
American scholars of his day, and the first President of Columbia College,
which however, he left after nine years, to return and pass a serene old
age at Stratford. He had been a Congregational minister in Connecticut,
but by reading the works of Barrow and other eminent divines of the
Anglican Church, became a convert to that church, went to England, and
taking orders returned to introduce its ritual into Connecticut. He was
the friend of Bishop Berkeley, whose arm-chair was preserved as an
heir-loom in his family. When in England, he saw Pope, who gave him
cuttings from his Twickenham willow. These he brought from the banks of
the Thames, and planted on the wilder borders of his own beautiful river
the Housatonic, which at Stratford enters the Sound. They were, probably,
the progenitors of all the weeping willows which are seen in this part of
the country, where they rapidly grow to a size which I have never seen
them attain in any other part of the world.

The younger of these Dr. Johnsons--for they both received the degree of
Doctor of Divinity from the University of Oxford--had a daughter
Elizabeth, who married Daniel Crommelin Verplanck, the son of Samuel
Verplanck, and the only fruit of their marriage was the subject of this
memoir. The fair-haired young mother was a frequent visitor with her child
to Stratford, where, under the willow trees from Twickenham, as appears
from some of her letters, he learned to walk. She died when he was but
three years old, leaving the boy to the care of his grandmother, by whom
he was indulgently yet carefully reared.

The grandmother is spoken of as a lively little lady, often seen walking
up Wall Street, dressed in pink satin and in dainty high heeled shoes,
with a quaint jewelled watch swinging