of State when he was eight years old; now communicated, at great expense, by his own nurse.  Here’s the Sewer!  Here’s the New York Sewer in its twelfth thousand, with a whole column of New Yorkers to be shown up, and all their names printed.  Here’s the Sewer’s article upon the judge that tried him, day afore yesterday, for libel, and the Sewer’s tribute to the independent jury that didn’t convict him, and the Sewer’s account of what might have happened if they had!  Here’s the Sewer, always on the lookout; the leading journal of the United States!”

Such were the cries, according to the veracious account of Charles Dickens, who had paid his first visit to us a short time before, that greeted the ears of Martin Chuzzlewit upon his arrival in the gate city of the western world.  That amiable caricature reflects what the English novelist thought or pretended to think, of the New York journalism of the day.  Exaggeration, of course:  the bad manners of a young genius of the British lower middle classes.  But quite good-naturedly today we concede that beneath bad manners and exaggeration there was a foundation of truth.  Into the making of Colonel Diver, the editor of the “Rowdy Journal,” may have gone a little of old Noah, of the “Star,” or James Watson Webb, of the “Courier and Enquirer,” or Colonel Stone, of the “Commercial.”  Can’t you see those grim figures of an old world strutting down Broadway, glaring about belligerently and suspiciously?  Almost every editor of that period had a theatre feud at one day or another.  On the luckless mummer who had incurred his displeasure he poured out the vials of his wrath.  He incited audiences to riot.  Against his brother editors he hurled such epithets as “loathsome and leprous slanderer and libeller,” “pestilential scoundrel,” “polluted wretch,” “foul jaws,” “common bandit,” “prince of darkness,” “turkey buzzard,” “ghoul.”  Somehow, in thinking of the old days, I find it hard to reconcile those men and women who lived under the Knickerbocker sway with their newspapers.  It is pleasanter to dwell upon the old customs, to picture Mr. Manhattan leaving the scurrilous sheet behind him when he departed from his store or counting house, and repairing with clean hands to the wife of his bosom and his family, somewhere in Greenwich Village, or Richmond Hill, or Bond Street, or the beginnings of Fifth Avenue.

But to revert to the manners of the old town.  First of all there was the business of getting married.  It was with an idea of permanency then, and the Knickerbocker wedding was, in consequence, a ceremony.  To it, the groom, his best-man, and the ushers went attired in blue coats, brass buttons, high white satin stocks, ruffled-bosomed shirts, figured satin waistcoats, silk stockings, and pumps.  The New Yorker’s tailor, if his pretensions to fashion were well-founded, was Elmendorf, or Brundage, or Wheeler, or Tryon and Derby; his hatter, St. John, and his bootmakers, Kimball and Rogers.  For the wedding ceremony, the man’s