fearless, and good-tempered.  If the Herald wants the mere expansion which many journals possess, we shall try to make it up in industry, good taste, brevity, variety, point, piquancy, and cheapness.”

He proceeded immediately to give a specimen of the “comments” thus described, in the form of a review of an Annual Register just published.  The Register informed him that there were 1,492 “rogues in the State Prison.”  His comment was:  “But God only knows how many out of prison, preying upon the community, in the shape of gamblers, blacklegs, speculators, and politicians.”  He learned from the Register that the poor-house contained 6,547 paupers; to which he added, “and double the number going there as fast as indolence and intemperance can carry them.”  The first numbers were filled with nonsense and gossip about the city of New York, to which his poverty confined him.  He had no boat with which to board arriving ships, no share in the pony express from Washington, and no correspondents in other cities.  All he could do was to catch the floating gossip, scandal, and folly of the town, and present as much of them every day as one man could get upon paper by sixteen hours’ labor.  He laughed at everything and everybody,—­not excepting himself and his squint eye,—­and, though his jokes were not always good, they were generally good enough.  People laughed, and were willing to expend a cent the next day to see what new folly the man would commit or relate.  We all like to read about our own neighborhood:  this paper gratified the propensity.

The man, we repeat, really had a vein of poetry in him, and the first numbers of the Herald show it.  He had occasion to mention, one day, that Broadway was about to be paved with wooden blocks.  This was not a very promising subject for a poetical comment; but he added:  “When this is done, every vehicle will have to wear sleigh-bells as in sleighing times, and Broadway will be so quiet that you can pay a compliment to a lady, in passing, and she will hear you.”  This was nothing in itself; but here was a man wrestling with fate in a cellar, who could turn you out two hundred such paragraphs a week, the year round.  Many men can growl in a cellar; this man could laugh, and keep laughing, and make the floating population of a city laugh with him.  It must be owned, too, that he had a little real insight into the nature of things around him,—­a little Scotch sense, as well as an inexhaustible fund of French vivacity.  Alluding, once, to the “hard money” cry, by which the lying politicians of the day carried elections, he exploded that nonsense in two lines:  “If a man gets the wearable or the eatable he wants, what cares he whether he has gold or paper-money?” He devoted two sentences to the Old School and New School Presbyterian controversy:  “Great trouble among the Presbyterians just now.  The question in dispute is, whether or not a man can do anything towards saving his own soul.”