While engaged on his first work, Mr. Prescott was almost entirely deprived of the use of his eyes; so that all of the laborious reference to materials, and the actual writing of the book, was by dictation to an amanuensis Indeed all his reading and literary labours, since the age of twenty, have been done in this way; a remarkable instance of patient and successful perseverance. From this affliction he has now happily recovered, or nearly so. He is still a young man, on the sunny side of thirty-five, and a fine specimen, physically as well as mentally, of a New England gentleman. He is understood to be now engaged on the History of the Conquest of Peru. English critics have united in placing him in the first rank of modern historians.

John L. Stephens, the enterprising and intelligent traveller in Yucatan and the East, is a native and resident in New York, where he was educated for the bar. The anonymous publication of his first work, on Arabia Petræa, etc., as already mentioned, was at once remarkably successful. Many who would have shrunk from more learned and drier descriptions, were for the first time made familiar, by his pleasant and sensible pages, with the actual condition and every-day life of the land of Ishmael and of Pharaoh. His persevering and adventurous researches in Yucatan have been more elaborately presented, and have made the world familiar with the gigantic and wonderful remains of a former age. No traveller, probably in modern times, has had a larger number of readers.

Catherine M. Sedgewick, is a native of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and belongs to a family which has for

J. Ferenson Cooper

nological collector of national jingles. With the exception of the political writings of Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, already mentioned, the works of Franklin and the State Papers of Washington, the durable part of American literature, if there be any such, belongs to the last 30 years.

The veteran Noah Webster, who died two years since, at the age of eighty-five, was the first to propose a law for the recognition and protection of literary property in the United States. This was soon after the national independence was accomplished. Webster was the author of several useful works on education, besides historical and political papers, which were recently collected. His elementary spellingbook is used in every part of the country, and has been the chief cause of that uniformity of pronunciation in widely distant places, which has been often remarked by travellers. His great 'American Dictionary of the English Language', the product of thirty years' labour, was reprinted in England, and by good authorities pronounced the most comprehensive and useful one extant. It is now the general standard in the United States, and in various abridged forms is found in nearly all the schools and private libraries. Webster was much respected as a true benefactor of his country; at his funeral some hundred young ladies, from schools in the place, walked to his grave with a long procession of citizens, and heard there an eloquent eulogy on his virtues.

James Fennimore Cooper, the novelist, now resides at the family seat at Cooperstown, New York, the 'Templeton' of the 'Pioneers.' He has written in all, twenty-one novels; a naval history, the American