of the period. Long before this time, however, Washington Irving planned and partially executed his "Knickerbocker History of New York" in Wall Street. The charm his genius threw into the title of the work has caused many a grave scholar to search the old Holland records for the origin of the popular term "Knickerbocker," which is not only applied by common consent to the early Dutch inhabitants of New York, but is prefixed to nearly every article in the range of industrial products on this side of the Atlantic: and yet its fame dates no further back than the humorous history of Irving, concocted in the little office in Wall Street, about 1807. At the present moment we have a living, breathing, practical contradiction of the oft-repeated assertion that a poet cannot also be a man of business. Edmund Clarence Stedman is one of the active members of the Stock Exchange, and although of slight, delicate organization, with an excess of nervous force, he finds opportunity and mental strength for some of the finest poetical productions in the language. His studies and his severely refined taste have rendered him an admirable critic, and the service he has rendered to letters by his analytic reviews and aæsthetic essays during the past ten years it would be difficult to overestimate. Perhaps the stimulating vortex of the Stock Exchange may have been a spur to his genius. He is now engaged in his moments of leisure upon an extended work, "The Rise of Poetry in America," a companion volume to the Victorian Poets, and is an active member and trustee of a half dozen or more scholarly societies and clubs. He has remembered Wall Street in a beautiful little poem, written in 1867, of which the following are its opening lines:
"Just where the Treasury's marble front
Looks over Wall Street's mingled nations;
Where Jews and Gentiles most are wont
To throng for trade and last quotations;
Where, hour by hour, the rates of gold
Outrival, in the ears of people,
The quarter-chimes, serenely tolled
From Trinity's undaunted steeple—"
