his condition, nor backward in suggestions. In the great celebration which took place in this city in November, 1825, when the waters of Erie united with the Atlantic, the effigy of Colles was borne with appropriate dignity among the emblems of that vast procession. But to John Pintard was Colles most indebted, many years, for numerous acts of beneficence and for his bounty in greatest need. As through his whole life of four-score years he had always more ideas in his brain than pennies in his pocket, he must have proved something more than an occasional customer.
As Colles was an instructive representative of much of that peculiarity in the condition and affairs of New-York at the time in which he may be said to have flourished, I shall trespass a moment, by a brief exhibit of the circumstances which marked the period in which he was upon the whole a prominent character. Every body seemed to know him; no one spoke disparagingly of him. His enthusiasm, his restlessness were familiar to the citizens at large. He, in short, was a part of our domestic history, and an extra word or two may be tolerated the better to give him his fair proportions. Had I encountered Colles in any land, I would have been willing to have naturalized him to our soil and institutions. He had virtues, the exercise of which must prove profitable to any people. The biographer of Chaucer has seen fit, inasmuch as his hero was born in London, to give us a history and description of that city at the time of Chaucer's birth, as a suitable introduction to his work. I shall attempt no such task, nor shall I endeavor to make Colles a hero, much as I desire to swell his dimensions. I shall circumscribe him to a chap-book; he might be distended to a quarto. Yet the ardent and untiring man was so connected with divers affairs, even after he had domesticated himself among us, that the every movement in which he took a part must have had a salutary influence on the masses of those days. He was a lover of nature, and our village city of that time gave him a fair opportunity of recreation among the lordly plane, and elm, and catalpa trees of Wall-street, Broadway, Pearl-street, and the Bowery. The beautiful groves about Richmond Hill and Lispenard Meadows, and old Vauxhall, mitigated the dullness incident to his continuous toil. A trip to the scattered residences of Brooklyn awakened
