rural associations; a sail to Communipaw gave him the opportunity of studying marls and the bivalves. That divine principle of celestial origin, religious toleration, seems to have had a strong hold on the people of that day; and the persecuted Priestley, shortly after he reached our shores, held forth in the old Presbyterian Church in Wall-street, doubtless favored in a measure by the friendship of old Dr. Rodgers, a convert to Whitefield, and a pupil of Witherspoon. This fact I received from John Pintard. Livingston and Rodgers, Moore and Provoost supplied the best Christian dietetics his panting desires needed; while in the persons of Bayley and Kissam, and Hosack and Post he felt secure from the misery of dislocations and fractures, and that alarming pest, the yellow fever. He saw the bar occupied with such advocates as Hamilton and Burr, Hoffmann and Colden, and he dreaded neither the assaults of the lawless, nor the chicanery of contractors. The old Tontine gave him more daily news than he had time to digest, and the Argus and Minerva, Freneau's Time-Piece and Sword's New-York Magazine inspired him with increased zeal for liberty and a fondness for belles-letters. The City Library had, even at that early day, the same tenacity of purpose which marks its career at the present hour. There were literary warehouses in abundance. Judah had decorated his with the portrait of Paine, and here Colles might study Common Sense and the Rights of Man, or he might stroll to the store of Duyckinck, the patron of books of piety, works on education, and Noah Webster; or join tête-a-tête with old Hugh Gaine or James Rivington and Philip Freneau; now all in harmony, notwithstanding the withering satire against those accommodating old tories by the great bard of the revolutionary crisis.
The infantile intellect of those days was enlarged with Humpty-Dumpty and Hi-diddle-diddle.[1] Shop-windows were stored with
- ↑ We have books without end concerning the origin of nations and races, while these mental instructors of a people have been favored with scarcely a pamphlet in vindication of their claims to our consideration. I lave Inserted below the two best Latin versions descriptive of their trials and mishaps. They have been too long the schoolmasters of early thought to be longer overlooked. Why do not our scholars ferret out their birth-place, whether High Dutch or Low Dutch, with more satisfaction, instead of referring us to the drama of the sixteenth century and the Bodlelan Library? Would the task prove unworthy of the learning of the distinguished teacher of German, Professor Schmidt, of Columbia College? He might find in the inquiry a pastime from the cares of his
