The high qualities and the strong abilities of the young editor did not fail to strike the discerning eye of President Madison, who speedily gave him his affection and confidence.  To that Administration the “Intelligencer” stood in the most intimate and faithful relations,—­sustaining its policy as a necessity, where it might not have been a choice.  During the entire course of the war, the “Intelligencer” sustained most vigorously all the measures needful for carrying it on with efficiency; and it did equally good service in reanimating, whenever it had slackened at any disaster, the drooping spirit of our people.  Nor did its editors, when there were two, stop at these proofs of sincerity, nor slink, when danger drew near, from that hazard of their own persons to which they had stirred up the country.  When invasion came, they at once took to arms, as volunteer common-soldiers, went to meet the enemy, and remained in the field until he had fallen back to the coast.  And during the invasion of Washington, moreover, their establishment was attacked and partially destroyed, through an unmanly spirit of revenge on the part of the British forces.  In October, 1812, proposing to himself the change of his paper into a daily one, as was accordingly brought about on the first of January ensuing, Mr. Gales invited Mr. Seaton, who had by this time become his brother-in-law, to come and join him.  He did so; and the early tie of youthful friendship, which had grown between them at Raleigh, and which the new relation had drawn still closer, gradually matured into that more than friendship or brotherhood, that oneness and identity of all purposes, opinions, and interests which has ever since existed between them, without a moment’s interruption, and has long been, to those who understood it, a rare spectacle of that concord and affection so seldom witnessed, and could never have come about except between men of singular virtues.

The same year that brought Gales and Seaton together as partners in business witnessed an alliance of a more interesting character; for it was in 1813 that Mr. Gales married the accomplished daughter of Theodorick Lee, younger brother of that brilliant soldier of the Revolution, the “Legionary Harry.”

But, at this natural point, the writer must go back for a while, in order to bring down the story of William Seaton to where, uniting with his associate’s, the two thus flow on in a single stream.

He was born January 11th, 1785, on the paternal estate in King William County, Virginia, one of a family of four sons and three daughters.  At the good old mansion passed his childhood.  There, too, according to what was then the wont in Virginia, he trod the first steps of learning, under the guidance of a domestic tutor, a decayed gentleman, old and bedridden; for the only part left him of a genteel inheritance was the gout.  But when it became necessary to send his riper progeny abroad, for more advanced studies, Mr. Seaton very justly bethought